I was wrong about the Democratic Party #walkaway

A friend, Tom Wright, directed my attention to a very interesting video of one young woman's story of the toxic culture experienced by a Teach for America teacher in a government-run school and then as a registered nurse in Los Angeles, CA. She had been brought up a Democrat and had long believed that conservatives were simply bad people. She learned that the progressive Democrat program maintained, rather than solved problems. She realized that many Democrats had so identified themselves as heroes fighting the problems of society, whether racism, women's rights, and homophobia, that they could not actually allow the problems to be solved because then their hero status would disappear. Policies that proved ineffective or catastrophic were continued, despite their clear failure.

She realized that many of the Democrats attitudes were grounded on a belief that some minorities simply were incapable of having the character expected of other Americans. In other words, they were bigoted. She came to realize that the main stream media cherry picked facts, dropped the context of events, told stories in a way to misdirect people, and simply ignored stories they could not present in a manner to misdirect their listeners. For some time, she found herself understanding that the Democrat agenda was very bad for people, but she still had a hard time examining the ideas of conservatives. In time she managed to overcome the barrier that she had long believed that Republicans and conservatives were not the evil people the Democrats had portrayed them to be.

The story of her evolution in the development of an independent mind is very fascinating. It is well worth listening to. See Georgia's great video about how she developed an independent mind -- a beautiful mind.

Progressive Experts are Superior to Parents in Raising Children -- So They Claim

The 1930 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection under the Hoover administration claimed that progressive experts were superior to parents in raising children in the Progressive Age because "it is beyond the capacity of an individual parent to train her child to fit into the intricate, interwoven, and interdependent social and economic system we have developed."

Do not wonder why the public schools to which parents are forced to send their children are so disdainful of parents and their values and their attempts to play an important role in the education of their own children.  If individual parents were incapable of performing these roles in 1930 because society and our economic system was so complex, then in 2018 parents must be vastly less capable.  Indeed, that job is a hard one.  Yet, I have seen no evidence that Progressive Experts are better able to handle that difficult task.  Indeed, they have proven themselves to be unusually blind to the reality of our society and of our economic system.  If the average parent is wanting in this task, it does not follow that the Progressive Expert is not vastly more wanting in the job of raising children.

The public schools are used as a wedge between parents and their children.  Many parents are inclined to forfeit much of their role as parents to the schools and in some cases to government agencies other than the schools.  In effect, the government becomes a force that diminishes the role of parents and substitutes its one-size-fits-all ideas for raising children.  This control over children allows them to form children as willing subjects of ever-increasing government incursions against individuality, independent and rational thinking, and individual rights in favor of collectivism and a willingness to accept the authority of government officials.

But since the Progressive Experts (Elitists) have declared the parents incompetent in the raising of their own children, this is all done for the good of the child.  The parents have been designated the Deplorables since at least 1930 by the Progressive Elitists.  Actually, they were so designated by some socialists in America about 100 years before that.  Never mind the wondrous claim that these Progressive Experts implicitly make that they do not even have to know any more about your child than will fit into a simple classification system.  Every child is a stereotype of that simple classification system.  What decent parent can tolerate this treatment of our children?  We, unlike the Progressive Elitist Education Experts, at least know our children as individuals.  What could be more important than that knowledge in educating children and preparing them for adulthood?

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.

The Good and the Bad in the Lame Duck Congress Bill to Avoid a Huge Tax Increase

The Lame Duck Congress bill about to be approved by the Senate to prevent a huge tax increase mixes good measures with bad measures.  In evaluating the overall desirability of the bill, we need to remember that this is a Congress whose complete record is one of huge overspending and micromanagement of individuals and the economy by central planners.  The recent election will change the character of the incoming Congress in January, but did nothing to change the individual characters of the members of the Lame Duck Congress.  They remain at heart taxers who will spend still much more than tax revenues will allow.  The great news is that the big spenders will be constrained in the next Congress by a dose of more spending-responsible Congressmen.  In the meantime, this bill is much less bad than one would expect from this Lame Duck Congress, though far short of what it should be.

Some of the bill provision evaluations I will make below are not based on the model of a truly legitimate government.  They are based on the situation we live in with a federal government having tax and spending levels about three or four times what they would legitimately and constitutionally be.  They are also based on the fact that the reason we are in a deep recession still owes in large part to the Obama and the Progressive Socialist controlled present Congress.  These judgments are made in the context of these facts and out of concern for the present suffering of many Americans.

The Good:

• Extension for 2 years of the income tax brackets of the Bush tax cuts.
• Extension for 2 years of the reduced capital gains and dividends taxes of the Bush tax cuts.
• Extension of adoption expense tax credit.
• Continuation of the American Opportunity Tax Credit for college tuition for 2011 and 2012. Context dependent.
• Extension of the Child Tax Credit.
• Extension of the increased amount of the alternative minimum tax exemption and for nonrefundable personal credits.
• Continued elimination of the death tax on estates of less than $5 million.
•  100% expensing for small business investment up to $125,000 in 2012 and up to $25,000 thereafter.
• Deduction of State and local sales taxes, which rights wrongful discrimination against states with no or low income taxes.
• Research credit for businesses.
• 15-year depreciation for some leasehold improvements, restaurant buildings, and retail improvements.
• Mortgage insurance premium tax deduction extension through 2011.

The Bad:

• Extension of unemployment benefits for up to 99 weeks for another 13 months, thereby ensuring that businesses under strain pay for unemployment to remain higher than it otherwise would be.  Companies are not responsible for people being unemployed up to 99 weeks.  Anyone unemployed that long is lacking severely in self-initiative.
• 2% reduction in the 12.4% Social Security tax bringing it down to 10.4% and further underfunding the highly underfunded Social Security Ponzi Scheme.  This is almost a toss-up evaluation since the Social Security tax money is really treated as though it is general fund money.  It has been a fiction that it is dedicated to the Social Security program and this contributes to revealing that fiction.
• A 35% tax on estates valued at $5 million or more, which will badly damage many businesses and immorally attacks the results of many years of productive labor.
• Extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit through 2012, which is unearned income.
• Increased gift taxes.
• Incentives for biodiesel and renewable diesel.
• Credit for refined coal facilities.
• New energy efficient home credit.
• Tax credits and subsidies for alternative fuel and fuel mixtures.
• Extension of the cash grants of 30% for renewable energy projects with no profits due to lack of economic usefulness.
• Extension of ethanol production supports, which is a numskull program.
• Energy-efficient appliance credits, which should need no credits if they make sense.
• Alternative fuel vehicle refueling property tax credit extension.
• Exclusion from income of employer benefits for mass transit use and parking.
• Indian employment tax credit, which is clearly racial discrimination.
• Accelerated depreciation of business property on Indian reservations.
• Tax incentives for investments in the District of Columbia.
• Tax credits dedicated to Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and American Somoa.
• Work Opportunity Credit to business for hiring certain favored groups with high unemployment.

In addition to these provisions, there are many more.  Since the bill itself consists of a list of how a line or phrase in a previously passed law is changed, it is very difficult to assess just what the effects of many provisions are.  This is the studied way in which our Congress makes its activities transparent!  This practice keeps both citizens and Congressmen alike from reading the bills before the Congress.  We are really governed by the staff of the Congressmen and the lobbyists who assist them with the writing of these obscure documents.

This bill is loaded with nonsense that should not be in it.  At the same time, there are also many good provisions.  Compared to what we have seen in the prior actions of this Congress, this is a good bill.  It has too many additional spending components such as the extension of unemployment benefits and a continued commitment to the uneconomic and foolish alternative energy projects.  If it is passed as such, it will not be as good a bill as one which would likely be passed in January when the new Congress begins its session.  There are advantages to letting everyone know next year's tax rates, but this bill also has some sad pork in it.  At this point, I think it is pretty much a toss-up whether this bill is passed now or a better bill is passed in a few weeks. 

I am leaning marginally toward the somewhat better bill in a few weeks in the next Congress though.  That is also not without its problems.  The main problem is that one would like the new Congress to get right to work on spending cuts.  Unfortunately, the Progressive Socialists still control the Senate and occupy the White House, which means the improved Congress is not likely to be able to make cuts in previously funded programs.  Fortunately, this now Lame Duck Congress has not done its budget approval job and the new Congress will be able to do much more to constrain the current fiscal year spending than would otherwise be the case.  If the present bill to stop the massive tax increase is passed in this Congress, the next one will be able to more quickly get down to business on spending cuts.  It also needs very badly to cut the highest in the world American corporate tax rate.  That is not too bad an alternative situation.

The new TSA full, full, full body search in the context of our individual rights

I just read about the horror of a woman who had undergone the new TSA full body search procedure in which her breasts, buttocks, vagina area and labia were all felt.  This does represent a new way in which we have lost the ownership of our own bodies, but it is not unrelated to many other ways in which the ownership of our bodies and minds has been challenged successfully by government.  I also understand that some will say this trade off of our ownership of our bodies is justified because otherwise the government cannot offer us complete assurance that we will survive a flight.  The decision is not trivial, yet there are reasons why we must draw the line on what the government can do with our bodies, if we are to maintain the ownership of our own bodies.  While I personally would not feel the horror the woman searched in the story did about being so searched, each of us as individuals should have the right to feel or not feel that horror.  Her body is hers.  We must respect that.  And though I do not feel the horror, I do very much resent being searched.  I resented it even more when my 12 year old daughter was searched on 3 legs of 4 legs of a round-trip flight between Baltimore and Tulsa years ago.  Apparently, those searches today would be much more invasive.

The full body search with sexual intimacy is logically consistent with the idea that we as individuals do not own our own bodies and minds.  We are to be forced to buy health insurance approved by elitist bureaucrats, because we are incapable of rationally providing for the care of our own bodies and the state has an interest in the ownership of our bodies.  We are told that we cannot decide when to use a seatbelt, a bike helmet, or whether to use tobacco or marijuana, because the state shares the ownership of our bodies.  We are told in some locales that we cannot eat some foods because some politicians think those foods are not healthy and they own our bodies.  In an earlier day, males were told that they did not own their minds and bodies and that it was appropriate to conscript them and force them to fight in undeclared wars.  We are told that only government-owned or government-approved schools can educate us, because we do not own our own minds, which need to be indoctrinated with ideas beneficial to government control of the People.  For a very long time, government has discouraged people from developing their individual sexuality, once again an infringement upon the individual's right to own their own bodies and minds.

Ideas matter and the direction that many ideas take are often linked.  It is the old story that first they came for the Jews and I was not a Jew so I did not care much.  Then they came for the Gypsies and I was not a Gypsy.  Then they came for the mentally retarded and I was not mentally retarded.  Then they came for the old and the infirm and I was not old and infirm.  Then they came for me and no one else was me, so they did not care.

Our individual rights are many.  They may be summarized as:  every individual has an equal, sovereign right to life, liberty, property, the ownership of their own mind and body, and the pursuit of happiness.  Do not allow any attack on any of our broad rights to succeed because it threatens every other of our rights.  The forceful taking of each of our rights is a preparation for the next assault on the next right.  There can be no compromise on this, because the assaults are never-ending.  Long ago, we allowed the assaults on our property, right to work, right to hire, and income to reduce those rights to sometimes honored privileges.  We lost the right to our minds, when we allowed government to take over education.  We lost our rights to our bodies with the FDA, Medicare, Medicaid, and now ObamaCare.  We can no longer talk about such subjects as racism and affirmative action or the morality of judging people as individuals based upon their individual character on many college campuses run by our governments.  We have never allowed equal expression and equal treatment of people whose sexuality was not both heterosexual and monogamous.

Right after right has been compromised, because few people will defend all of our rights.  The employee does not care about the rights of the employer and thinks it is perfectly fine that the employer must act as an accountant, a tax record keeper, and a tax collector, all unpaid mandates forced upon him by government agents very willing to use force.  The man who earns a living using equipment such as laboratory equipment or that to manufacture goods, is hit hard with property taxes on that equipment, while the lawyer or the accountant is unequally hit with no such devastating tax.  Then the People complain that manufacturing jobs are going overseas and we are only a service economy!  Of course, few of us pay corporation taxes, so why shouldn't the U.S. have the highest corporation taxes in the OECD in 2011?  Of course, we will lament the fact that many U.S. multinationals are expanding operations abroad faster than in the U.S., but does it ever dawn on us that the unequal taxation of corporations is the reason, as well as a violation of the equal rights of the shareholders of that corporation? 

There is a very good reason for a holistic understanding of our rights as individuals and the implied necessity of a government of very limited powers, which our Constitution decreed as the demand of the People.  But the constitutional demand is not very strong when the People have forgotten that they must be the backbone of the Constitution, which by itself can only serve to bridge a momentary lapse of attention by the People.  It is very clear that it is unable to protect the rights of the individual when we pay little attention to them ourselves for a hundred years of determined Progressive attack and not infrequently of Conservative attack!

Harry Reid Complains About Slow Senate

Under Senator Harry Reid's term as Majority Leader this last couple of years, the Senate has buillt up a backlog of 400 items passed by the House of Representatives that the Senate has not taken up.  Despite the large Democrat majority, the Republicans have been able to keep the Senate from passing these 400 bills which are surely mostly further Progressive attempts to micro-manage the lives of the People.

In particular, Reid has recently complained about how Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, has kept the Senate from passing legislation to overhaul how the FDA controls our foods.  Reid claims to have spent the whole Congress on this FDA food control bill.  Senator Coburn thinks the Senate should say how it is going to pay for the new bill and that its merits should be discussed on the Senate floor.  Apparently, Reid believes a bill which some staffers have spent a whole session of Congress working up, which no Senators have read, and which has not been discussed on the Senate floor, is ready for passage.  He wants to use the Democrat's favorite trick of hurry up and pass this bill so we can find out what is in it.  Senator Coburn is a bad guy for standing in his way.

It is clear to me and I am sure to most Americans now, that Senator Coburn is protecting our individual freedoms and our General Welfare by opposing the tyrant Reid.  Can you even begin to imagine how much worse off we would be if the Senate had passed those 400 bills of new mischief and power aggrandizement that the huge Democrat majority in the House enabled them to pass.  The laundry list of socialist mandates and spending in those 400 bills is probably staggering.

The Politcal Spectrum and Economic Wrongheadedness

Daniel B. Klein, professor of economics at George Mason University, worked with pollster Zeljka Buturovic to characterize the relative degree of determined wrongheadedness of Americans self-identified as one of the following:

• Very Conservative
• Conservative
• Libertarian
• Moderate
• Liberal
• Progressive/ Very Liberal

They say they were out to measure the relative degree of economic enlightenment, but this is not an accurate a way of stating what they really did.  They rated responses to economic questions based on the responses:

• Strongly agree
• Somewhat agree
• Somewhat disagree
• Strongly disagree
• Not sure

Suppose the correct answer to the question is Strongly Agree.  They counted up the responses that were strongly wrong, namely those responding with Somewhat disagree and Strongly disagree.  The answer Not sure was not considered strongly wrong.  Thus, this was not a test for economic knowledge, which it has been mistakenly characterized as being.  Instead, it is a test for those who do not understand economics and who refuse to recognize that they do not understand it.  It is a test for the pretense of knowledge which does not exist!

What were the statements?  What are the correct answers?

1. Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.  Answer: Strongly agree
2. Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services.  Answer: Strongly agree.
3. Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago.  Answer: Strongly agree.
4. Rent control leads to housing shortages.  Answer: Strongly agree.
5. A company with the largest market share is a monopoly.  Answer:  Strongly disagree.
6. Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited.  Answer:  Strongly disagree.
7. Free trade leads to unemployment.  Answer: Strongly disagree.
8. Minimum wage laws raise unemployment.  Answer:  Strongly agree.

While it may allow one a faster response to these questions if one has previously thought about them, most of these statements are easy to think through and come to the correct answer.  For instance: restrictions on housing development will mean such things as a local government refusing to allow housing to be built on parcels of land in the county or town.  This must cause those parcels on which housing can be placed to be priced more highly, since the government is putting the restrictions on other land because otherwise housing would be placed on it.  Thus, the demand for housing is greater than the amount of land which will be made available, so the prices of that land will be bid upward.  Housing will be more expensive as a result.  There are other types of restrictions, such as building codes and requirements to use union labor or licensed tradesmen in the building, but all of these restrictions are placed precisely because they must be since they will raise costs.


Question 5 is really just an understanding of a definition, but as such, it requires some knowledge of economics as a study.  Question 3 requires some knowledge of how people lived 30 years ago, so it requires a bit of historical knowledge, which many young people may find challenging to come by.  Since young people are indoctrinated by the public schools and universities to become liberals and commonly have little historical knowledge of 30 years ago, this question may be a bit hard for some of them.

Question 7 is a more abstract question to which the answer is somewhat harder to think through on one's own.  But, Adam Smith and many others long ago figured this out.  It is reasonable to expect that the answer should be common knowledge today.  There are many special interests and political groups which have spread claims that free trade leads to unemployment, at least in the developed countries.  They claim that low-cost-of-labor countries are stealing American jobs.  But their wages are lower because they are less productive or production in their countries is less efficient or involves greater investment risks.  Many Americans only see the company making buggy whips whose product is now more cheaply produced in Kenya, so the American company has laid off workers.  They fail to see that the workers who were once employed making buggy whips are now becoming employed to make biomedical prostheses and infrared sensors and the old buggy whip manufacturing building is now being used to produce Kindles.  Study after study has shown that free trade leads to more jobs in the U.S. and across the world, while raising most people's standard of living.  But, it is clear that it is helpful to know some economics to understand the right answer to this question.  But also remember, one does not need to know the right answer, one only needs to know what one knows and what one does not know.  The answer 'I do not know' is not wrong.  It is not wrongheaded.  It is not a pretense to knowledge one does not have.

So, what are the results of this test for economic wrongheadedness?  Who across the political spectrum is found to be a big-headed pretender to knowledge?  Each very wrongheaded answer adds 1 to the score of each person.  The average for each person in each self-identified part of the political spectrum is given below.

• Very conservative, 1.30
• Libertarian, 1.38
• Conservative, 1.67
• Moderate, 3.67
• Liberal, 4.69
• Progressive/ Very liberal, 5.26

Note the very large jump in wrongheadedness between conservatives and moderates.  Those who are very conservative, libertarian, or conservative do not have a great tendency to pretend to economic knowledge which is in fact wrong.  Moderates are much more like liberals in their tendency to be wrongheaded.  The more liberal one is, the greater the pretense to knowledge in general and the more frequently that knowledge is economically wrong.  Progressives, which Obama and Hilary Clinton are, are very pretentious and very wrongheaded economically as a group.

Progressives answered the monopoly question badly wrong 31% of the time, while conservatives were badly wrong only 13% of the time.  Libertarians were so wrong only 7% of the time.

The Progressives were wrong on the living standard comparison 61% of the time, while conservatives were wrong 13% of the and libertarians were wrong 21% of the time.

Broken down on party lines the results were:

• Libertarians, 1.26
• Republicans, 1.61
• Democrats, 4.59

Another huge leap in economic wrongheadedness is found for Democrats.  So-called conservative Democrats clearly do little to improve the party standing relative to Liberals with the wrongheaded score of 4.69!

Ms. Buturovic noted that men scored better than women, as did married people better compared to those who were single.  She noted that particularly poor scores were earned by those who never shop at Wal-Mart or who consider themselves residents of the 'planet Earth', rather than of America or the city or town where they live.  She says, "It took many centuries for basic economic concepts and principles to be discovered so, in a sense, it is not that surprising that some people are having trouble grasping them."

Of those who have had trouble grasping the principles and concepts of economics, unusual numbers have become politicians, book writers, newspapermen, network news announcers of the mainstream media, public school teachers, and university professors outside of economics departments.  The elitists who believe they should rule America through socialist governments are happily wrongheaded about basic economics concepts and eager to force their mistakes on the rest of us.  We can readily see that in efforts of government to micromanage the economy through long-discredited central planning, the constant meddling in our personal lives, the excessive taxes, the still more excessive government spending, the self-indulgent salaries and benefits of government workers, the claims of government job creation in the private sector, and the many special interest groups chosen as the recipients of income and wealth redistribution thefts.

Declaring our Independence from the Progressive Aristocracy

The Progressive (Liberal, Socialist) elitists have become an aristocracy who rule, manage, and manipulate the remainder of Americans who are supposedly no more than organic bits of various special interest groups or factions.

The Progressives have long insisted that man's nature could evolve rapidly with proper indoctrination in the government-run schools to engineer American youth who hold socialist values.  Some of the indoctrinated would prove suitable to be selected as the new members of the aristocracy, but most would just be trained to be docile followers.  The government-run schools reflect this philosophy, with many schools being little more than holding cells to train the inmates in being members of an underclass and in doing as they are told by authorities.  Some schools have effective multiple tracks and some few produce many future Progressive elitists.  These indoctrinated youth are then to vote democratically to further enlarge government.

The old American tradition, stated in the Declaration of Independence, in which the only legitimate purpose of government is to protect the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the enemy of progress in their viewpoint.  This traditional American viewpoint necessitates a very limited government and a very dynamic private sector, where everyone has an equal right to exercise his choices and to find others who will associate or trade with him for a given purpose in a voluntary activity.  That limited government was provided for by the Constitution.  The Progressives claim these traditional, but radical, American ideals deny the science of history.  They have pointed to a long history of governments around the world always trying to expand their powers and usually succeeding in doing so.  They have claimed that history is a march of progress, so if many governments have succeeded in expanding their powers, this must be what progress is and progress must be good.  These governments with expanded powers need to be directed by energetic leaders who will not shrink from using force to promote the General Welfare, which is always found in the organic expression of shared democratic will.  The government tells the people what their rights are.  Those suitable for leadership are those most indoctrinated and knowledgeable about the goals of socialism.  These leaders are the graduates of the right colleges and are those who are well-connected in the network of Progressive activists.

The Progressives look down on people who produce goods and services in the free market and are paid with money.  They believe those who serve have a higher moral status, even if those who serve do so as government employees and are well paid with taxes levied mostly on the producers and taken from the producers under the threat of force.  The producers are evil because they use resources of the earth such as materials, because they change the earth, and because they pander to individuals acting on their individual goals and needs.  The Progressives believe that when the individual is subsumed by some group or other, the individual has become an organic part of a greater whole.  They believe there is some higher ideal reached whenever the individuality of the individual is diminished.  But Progressives do not have a very high regard for the ability of most people to choose their own values and then to manage their own lives in accordance with those values.  Indeed, they find the very idea of such an expression of individuality to be abhorrent.  If people were actually to do any such thing, the government would not be able to satisfy them with its central planning efforts.  The people must be taught to identify themselves with one group or even a number of different groups, so the Progressives and government can deal with the easier problem of just dealing with this much smaller number of groups.

Once the people are just so many groups or special interests, or factions, then the democratic process can be used to sort out who the winners and losers will be.  Of course, this results in quite a bit of a free-for-all, but that is why the elitist Progressives are needed as leaders and controllers of the governments.  They are the parents watching over the children squabbling over the toys in the sandbox and setting the rules of play.  The elite Progressives make the laws and regulations in government as the democratic rulers.  So, Progressives tend to flock to government positions because that is where the real action is.  They shun the private sector and they grow the public sector.  The game is in fact one of redistributing the wealth produced by the private sector through their hands in government and handing it out to grateful groups who will vote for them, give them money, and sing their praises. 

Of course, these leaders are so important to the cause of Progressivism, that it is perfectly reasonable for them to use their power to extort those in the private sector with threats to do them harm, unless the leaders are given enough money for their re-election campaigns ad nauseam.  Or, these leaders offer factions favorable legislation in exchange for re-election campaign backing, as they do to labor unions, teachers, trial lawyers, and many Wall Street investment firms.  These Progressive government employees are the new aristocracy.  Like the aristocracy of old, they control the levers of power to do whatever they want as they manipulate the peasants and give them just enough to keep them from rebelling.  At least this is how it has often worked in the past and it is how they believe it is supposed to be working now.

The Progressive elite is now furious.  Many of the peasants are revolting.  This is how they see the Tea Party protesters.  Their response has been one of utter hatred.  The hatred is so strong, that they describe the Tea Party rebels with all the words they have long associated with evil or disdain.  So, the Tea Party rebels must be racists.  They must be ignorant.  They must be trailer trash. The Progressives know this to be so, because the peasants must be evil to rebel against the progress of history and the evolution of society.

The Tea Party activists are not evil.  Mostly, they are American individualists who have finally taken notice that Progressivism is an attack upon their individuality.  It is an attempt to dictate to them what their personal values will be.  It is an attempt to micromanage their lives.  It is a refusal to recognize them as individuals.  It is a thorough-going attack upon the very idea that they have sovereign and unalienable rights which are not given to them by government.  It is an attack on the idea that legitimate government exists to protect the equal rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The Tea Party protesters are sick of the attacks on the productive Americans to force them to forever subsidize less productive Americans and illegal aliens.  They are sick of the transfer of wealth from the private sector to the public sector.  They are sick of the transformation of their personal choices in the private sector to democratic and factional choices in the public sector.  They are tired of being ignored and denigrated.  They are tired of an aristocracy of bureaucrats, politicians, college professors, and media people who look upon them as peasants.  They are sure that they are competent to choose their own values.  They know they are able to manage their own lives and make their own choices.  They have awakened to the fact that it is the free market that provides them with these choices and the opportunity to express themselves as individuals.  They are coming to understand that they have made themselves the individuals they are in large part and they want to continue to be in control of the development of their own character and that of their children.

A choice has to be made about the purpose and scope of government.  Our Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution chose very limited government consistent with the viewpoint that the General Welfare of the People who institute government was best served when government's function and scope was to simply protect the equal, sovereign, inalienable right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The individual American was seen as capable of choosing his own values and of managing his own life.  Freedoms such as freedom of speech, of press, and of assembly would allow any American to develop his knowledge, his judgment, and his character.  Americans had the freedom to work and to own property and the income from their work.  When an American individual wanted to work with others for a common goal, he could arrange that using his many freedoms of association and contract in the free market.  There he would have a plethora of choices and ample expression of his individuality.  The interests of many individuals could be worked out in great harmony in the private sector.  While our government had a measure of democracy in the choosing of its leaders, that democracy was constrained by the Constitution, which gave us a representative limited government.  This government of limited powers had a further balance of power within the branches of the government and between the federal government and the states that required a strong consensus to be developed before the federal government could act.  The power of government was to be limited, so that the warfare among factions would be limited.  Too powerful a government led to too many factions being created.  These factions then would fight too viciously for too much power.  In that environment, the rights of the individual could not be equally protected and they would not even be protected.  The General Welfare and the peace and tranquility of the nation would be damaged by such factional squabbles over the exercise of government power.  The antithesis of this American viewpoint is Progressivism, which is largely a European import.

Now consider what we have seen.  We have a Progressive government, which very little constrains itself in accordance with the Constitution.  We have top leaders who are disdainful of the People.  We have top leaders who have said they disagree with the Constitution and its limits on their power.  We have top leaders who tell us we only have the rights the government gives us.  It is clear this government is a Progressive government.  So, I ask you:

• Have we seen government serving the best interests of the American people (the General Welfare) with minimal factionalism and a great tranquility of our society?
• Do we see evidence that Americans have evolved such characters that they have lost their individuality and are willing to submerge themselves in a Hegelian whole of society? 
• Have we seen solid evidence that the Progressive ruling elite is able to choose our values for us better than we can choose them ourselves?
• Have we seen a powerful government evolve which wisely micromanages our lives?
• Have we seen this government make centrally planned economic decisions which are wise?
• Have we seen this government responsibly manage its finances and minimize the debt to be passed on to later generations?
• Do we like what we see in Europe so much that we agree that their way is superior to the American way of life?

I submit to you that the answer to each of these questions is NO!!!!  From this objective evaluation, I conclude that Progressivism is a proven failure.  It is a concept of government which is wholly unacceptable.  The vision of our Founders and of the Framers of the Constitution was in fact astoundingly wise.  They were not ignorant of the essence of Progressivism.  They considered it and they astutely rejected it.  They were right to do so.  I wish to encourage every American to think these issues and choices through carefully and to chose the most beneficial concept of government function and scope of these two waring viewpoints.  If you do so, I think most of you will be wise enough to confirm the wisdom of our Founders and the Framers of the Constitution.  They were the real advanced thinkers, not these wrongheaded so-called progressives who merely added a bit of democracy to an essentially aristocrats-know-best feudal merchantilist society.

Contrasting State Cross Border Business Health Compared to a Freedom Index

A recent discussion I was in with other alumni of Case Western Reserve University about the sorry state of Cleveland, which was just recently chosen by Forbes Magazine as the most miserable city in America, caused me to consider some of the effects on Cleveland of being in a state with a bad business climate.  Of course, the city of Cleveland does much to cause its own problems and can be said very reasonably to have a bad influence on the politics of the whole state of Ohio.  This case also caused me to think about the strange underdevelopment of southern New Jersey.  Then today, I read an article on the strong business performance of Northern Virginia compared to Washington, D.C. and the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.  What explains these differences?

There are major differences in the ability to do business based on regional factors such as location, geography, population density, transportation, and other factors besides political factors.  This makes it hard to fully compare doing business in South Dakota with doing it in New Jersey or Maryland.  But, if one is a business owner or prospective owner, there is often a fair equivalency in many of these other factors if you are deciding whether to establish your business in Northern Virginia or in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.  Similarly, it is very reasonable to consider putting your business in southeast Pennsylvania, Delaware, or Southern New Jersey.  Once again, one can choose Ohio, or one of Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, or Pennsylvania for many types of businesses.  Specifically, if one is considering the Cleveland, Ohio area, it is easy also to consider Pennsylvania.

I want to explore how far political freedom can be correlated with these remarkable differences in economic and business performance.  William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens have published Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom through the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, dated February 2009, which I previously discussed in a post here.  They rated and ranked the states for economic freedom and then again for personal freedom and provide an overall freedom ranking.  They correlate the degree of freedom with rates of internal net migration.  People, at least those willing to move, find freedom attractive.  Economic growth rates may also be suspected to be dependent upon economic freedom, and at least secondarily upon personal freedom as well.  Start-up companies commonly need to be able to attract bright, hardworking professionals.  It is reasonable to expect that many of them value personal freedom.

Consider the issue of the growth of Northern Virginia versus the Washington suburbs of Maryland.  In 1970, Northern Virginia accounted for 27.0% of the Gross Regional Product, with Suburban Maryland having a 34.5% share, and D.C. a 37.5% share.  In 2009, D.C.'s share had shrunk drastically to 22%, while Suburban Maryland had shrunk slightly to 32%.  Northern Virginia rose startlingly to 46% of the Gross Regional Product.  In absolute terms, all three sub-regions grew their gross product, but clearly the rate of growth in Northern Virginia greatly outstripped that of the Suburban Maryland and D.C. areas.

How did Virginia compare to Maryland in the freedom indices?  Virginia was ranked 13th on the Economic Freedom Index, while Maryland was ranked 34.  Virginia was ranked number 9 on the personal freedom index, while Maryland was ranked 50th.  For overall freedom, Virginia was ranked number 9 and Maryland was ranked number 46.  While other factors can be critical in starting a new business, many businesses will have a fairly balanced choice between Virginia and Maryland for other reasons and will then choose more economic and personal freedom.  D.C. is not ranked, but it is almost certainly worse than Maryland for freedom, so its more greatly fallen share of the Gross Regional Product is surely to be expected.  These freedoms are not just luxuries being chosen.  In many cases, they are the difference between business success and failure.

I have a friend who lives in Southern New Jersey and he has told me many stories of the poverty there, the miserable schools, and the very high local unemployment rates.  This was true prior to the recession.  Of course such a situation can make an area already look unattractive to a business.  But, there is plenty of relatively undeveloped land in Southern New Jersey and locations close to Philadelphia and densely populated Delaware areas.  It is also in the middle of the mid-Atlantic area.  Why is this area so highly undeveloped when Northern New Jersey has a high degree of development?

Well, if we look at Northern New Jersey and compare freedom there to that in New York, we find that New Jersey does relatively well, because New York is miserable.  On the Economic Freedom Index, New Jersey is 46, while New York is 50.  Both are awful, but New Jersey is at least competitive and even better.  On the Personal Freedom Index, New Jersey rates a 45 ranking, while New York is 48.  On the Overall Freedom Index New Jersey is 49 and New York is 50.  So Northern New Jersey can compete for businesses with New York.

But, Southern New Jersey has to compete with Pennsylvania and Delaware for businesses.  One has to expect that the fact that health insurance, as mandated by the respective states, being twice as expensive in New Jersey compared to Pennsylvania, for instance, might have some impact on how businesses will fare in the respective areas.  The Economic Freedom Index takes into account many other factors as well.  Comparing New Jersey to Pennsylvania and Delaware, we find that PA is 19, DE is 24, and NJ is a lowly 46.  On the Personal Freedom Index, PA is 29, DE is 36, and NJ is 45.  The Overall Freedom Index says PA is 20, DE is 26, and again we have our lowly NJ at 49.  The inducement here is clearly to choose Pennsylvania for your new business, or maybe Delaware.  But, Southern New Jersey looks like a hard choice to justify.

Cleveland is not quite so strongly affected by conditions in a state which is really close to it.  But still, many businesses might reasonably say that they have reason to be in the Eastern Mid-West and then choose a state to be in.  This will affect Cleveland.  Of these states, the nearest is Pennsylvania.  But, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia also border Ohio.  Let me list the states, their Economic Freedom Index ranking, their Personal Freedom Index ranking, and their Overall Freedom Index ranking:

PA, 19, 29, 20
WV, 40, 17, 33
KY, 33, 26, 32
IN, 16, 19, 13
MI, 15, 20, 14
OH, 32, 46, 38

On Overall Freedom, Ohio is dead last in its local region.  It is particularly poor with respect to Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  It is hardly a wonder that Ohio is having a hard time economically.  This, in turn, hurts Cleveland.  To be sure, the fact that it is very hard to start a business in Cleveland is an outstanding reason for it to be a basket case.  John Stossel recently pointed out that a Cleveland official recently boasted that they helped a company set up a business in Cleveland in a mere 18 months.  In comparison, a company was started in Houston in one day.  Cleveland has 22 zoning categories, while Houston has none.  Cleveland has a penchant for electing kooks as mayor.  Dennis Kucinich was one of the worst.  Dennis the Menace is blatantly opposed to the profit motive.  He is now in the House of Representatives and for a long while opposed ObamaCare because it was not a single-payer program.  He caved after a ride with Obama in Air Force One.  [Did Obama threaten to throw him out the door at altitude?  Dennis should have held true to his convictions.]

The Progressives view freedom as the archaic and quaint coin to be paid for the aid of the needy.  Or so they say.  They do have an uncanny penchant for making the politically-connected wealthy much more wealthy and even those who are only politically connected wealthy.  But, history tells us that man's condition was little improved for eons until capitalism and the free market system began its rapid development in the 1800s.  Comparative studies today of the countries around the world show huge advantages in overall prosperity and the prosperity of the poor in nations for those nations with higher degrees of freedom.  The little study above also shows that there is some considerable reason to believe that even the differences between adjacent states in the United States are very important for the economic development of states and regions in those states.

Trading freedom for redistributionist schemes is a fool's errand.  The average wealth and income will fall, as will the median wealth and income, as will the wealth and income of the poor.  No one wins, except those who are consumed by envy and must level everyone to poverty to slake the thirst of that lowly envy.  Frankly, every state should be in a keen competition with the states near it to provide its citizens with more freedom than those neighboring states do.  Of course, the politicians would hate to see such a competition be widely recognized as important by the People.  They do everything they can to avoid letting us know about this, including insisting that the government-run schools not teach students about this source of American Exceptionalism.  We are prosperous because we are free.  As we lose our freedom, we will lose our prosperity.

Gore The Bore Resurfaces on Climate Change

Al Gore, the pontificater, the bore, the Yale elitist with the gentleman C grades in easy courses, has risen from the dead with an Op-Ed to the New York Times on 28 February 2010. It had seemed he was keeping a low profile due to the many revelations of bad science and outright fraud being the real source of the claims for the catastrophic man-made global warming due to CO2 emissions alarm. While he is about to make many assertions that man needs to take action to prevent global warming, there are some very interesting evasions of offering any evidence that global warming is occurring or that it is in fact caused by man's use of fossil fuels. He also hedges his bets on the reality of man-made catastrophic global warming in effect by saying that we must

deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

Let us examine this energy and alternative energy job claim for a moment and then I will move on the global warming issues.  He complains that we have a growing dependence on oil from the most unstable region of the world.  Well, Iraq is embarking on an ambitious program to expand its oil production to exceed that of Saudi Arabia [The Economist, 20-26 Feb 2010].  It may not accomplish this quickly, but if it even comes close to matching the output of Saudi Arabia, the cost of oil will remain very reasonable for many years to come and the alternative energy companies Al Gore has invested heavily in will not be able to compete, even with much larger government subsidies than our government drowning in debt can provide.  OK, yes, Iraq is still in this volatile region, but every additional supply of oil adds to our energy security.  Of course, one can also ask Gore why he and his Progressive friends who care so much about energy security and who do not want to pay for oil abroad will not allow us to explore, drill, and develop oil fields in our own off-shore waters and in the ridiculously innumerable acres of government-held land in the U.S.  Neither does he explain why taxing the oil companies more heavily will help them to find more oil in the U.S. and abroad.  Neither does he explain why sending money abroad to buy oil is somehow worse than sending money abroad to buy any other goods, services, or resources.  We live in a global economy, which he seems to disparage with his fear of depending upon a global oil market, which in fact is a great advantage to us in stabilizing the price of oil and assuring its availability.

Next he makes the outrageous claim that we trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy.  I really do not know what he is basing these claims on.  It is true that China is rapidly increasing its output of cheap, inefficient solar panels largely for sales to countries with mandates requiring that they generate power with expensive solar power plants.  The technology is more advanced in the U.S., but our costs of production are rather high.  Perhaps Al Gore should call for a steep reduction in our absurdly high corporate income tax which makes it very difficult for American companies to compete in the global markets Al so fears.  After all, the U.S. and Japan, whose economy has not been able to get out of the starting blocks for the last 15 years, have the highest corporate taxes in the world today and Obama wants to make them higher!  Of course, Al would probably want a tax reduction only for his solar power companies, being a crony capitalist.  Then he also claims that he has enumerated the most important sources of jobs for the 21st Century.  What do you suppose the track record Teddy Roosevelt would have had for predicting the main sources of jobs in the 20th Century in 1910?  Or, you may substitute the name of any politician of that time you might prefer.

Al Gore goes on to say:

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.
It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

 I have dealt enough with the scientific scandal of the claims made by the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists that I will not lay out the magnitude of the problems here again, though I will continue to discuss those problems in other posts.  I am just going to say that this attempt to minimize the scientific problems of the global warming alarmists has not held up in Australia or now in the United Kingdom and is beginning to collapse on the heads of such alarmists in the U.S. also.  Many comedians are now picking up on this fraud and that is usually the end of any theory being taken seriously!  So, Al Gore shows himself here as an ostrich with his head in the sand.  Perhaps this is a delaying tactic, so he will have time to unload his alternative energy stocks on other Progressive suckers.

By the way, when I tried to warn other alumni of Brown University and Case Western Reserve University of how the scientific argument for man-made global warming had fallen apart and that the alternative energy companies were going to have a very hard time of it as a result a couple of months ago, I was called rude, trailer trash, a flat-earther, and many other names by a great many alumni.  Some of them had invested in alternative energy, one planned to work for such a company when he finished his graduate studies, one was an associate professor whose research grants depended upon the scare, and many others were just being good religious Progressives.

Al goes on to say:

the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

The record of the UN IPCC reports has been to consistently overestimate the sea level rise and there is no reason known to me to think that more recently they have underestimated sea level rise to come.  The Arctic ice cap expands and contracts mostly due to winds and not due to melting, so it is rather insensitive to any modest warming, such as that since the end of the Little Ice Age.  In any case, if sea ice melts, it does not change the sea level!  The ice on Baffin Island and on Greenland can cause the sea level to rise, but there is no reason to think all that ice is going to melt either.  This is just more groundless alarmism perhaps issued to help his stocks hold value until he can unload them.  As for Antarctica, most of the continent has been experiencing ice expansion, not contraction, in recent times and again there is no reason for alarm.  Furthermore, there is no link to man's CO2 emissions here.

Then he makes the claim that

January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

And this is almost certainly nonsense also.  The official NOAA land surface temperature data has been so badly manipulated to make it seem as though the world has been warming that we now know that data is useless for establishing whether a given month or year is one of the warmer months or years in the last 130 years.  Absolutely a meaningless claim.  This is the word of an inveterate liar, so that everything such a liar has to say must be taken as meaningless.  How naive does Gore think the American People are?

Now let us examine a perfectly illogical statement Al made:

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

Prof. Phil Jones, the former head of the CRU at the University of East Anglia and a stalwart alarmist, recently stated that there has been no significant global warming since 1995.  Since 2001, there has been a slight cooling, if anything, though this may also be regarded as insignificant.  Now, if there was warming from 1990 to 1995 and then the warming stopped, the decade from 2000 to 2010 would be the warmest decade in recent history, even though no warming had occurred since 1995.  But, Al wants us to believe that the claim that the last decade was the warmest means that warming has not stopped.  This does not logically follow Al.  You should have taken a philosophy course in remedial logic at Yale, Al.  The claim that the last decade has been the hottest since modern records have been kept is also based on the warming manipulated surface temperature records, which disagree with the satellite temperature records which are more accurate and have not been tampered with to try to create an exaggerated warming.

Al goes on to make the argument that the recent heavy snowfalls are the result of global warming causing an increase in winter humidity.  I have already debunked this argument in an earlier post.

Al's specious claims continue:

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

The global warming pollutant is primarily CO2 and it is not a pollutant any more than water vapor is.  By far the most ice is in the Antarctic and it is not melting as claimed.  Other ice-covered areas are growing and contracting from year to year as they usually do, but perhaps with a very slight tendency to melt due to the recent end of the Little Ice Age.  But, the seas are actually rising at a very slow rate compared to the average rise since the end of the last major Ice Age.  While some have rashly predicted that hurricanes will become stronger, there is no evidence in history to support this and the likelihood is disputed by the best experts on violent storms.  Last I knew, there was also no reason to believe that flooding and drought were significantly worse than at other times in history.  I have no idea where Gore got that claim.  As for the seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures, these go through cycles historically and there is no link to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.  Where does Al get all of this nonsense?  Probably from his day dreams, which he spent so much time doing when he got a D in the course of the global warming advocating professor he now claims was so important to him when he was at Yale.

Gore now ramps up the scale of human misery to be caused by global warming:

the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.

If the world were to become slightly warmer, life in most of the world would become easier, not harder.  There might be some civil unrest in Florida and Arizona, since fewer people from New England, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota would choose to move there upon retirement!  Any slight extension to the growing season would be welcomed, not feared, in those cooler places which the greatest warming has been occurring, if you could actually believe the claims that it has, which you cannot.  The increase in deadly diseases idea does not hold water either.  For instance, it is claimed malaria will spread north.  Nonsense, malaria was widely in the north in the 1800s when it was colder than now.  It moved south mostly because swamps and marshes in the north were drained and because DDT was widely used there in earlier decades.

Next Al Gore informs us about his political, ethical, and human race assessments.  This is interesting.  He bemoans the fact that the economy is now largely global, that the industrial countries do not want to lose their jobs, and that the emerging economies have rising expectations.  He goes on:

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.

Apparently, he thinks the world should be bipolar and that communism somehow made it more properly bipolar.  He thinks a strong belief in market economics is hubris.  He claims that government is the democracy sphere and that it is in opposition to the market sphere.  This is really weird.  Government, even when largely democratic, does not allow everyone the freedom to buy whatever goods and services they choose individually or allow them to start their own business or allow them to work freely for anyone who wishes to hire them.  Government, even so-called democratic government, always tends to interfere with these personal decisions.  There is no more democratic way for a free People to live than in a free market economy.  Yet, Gore tries to make us think that the one-size-fits-all-decrees of government make for a more democratic society than does a free market society.  Hogwash.

Next, Gore sets out on a tirade against television:

Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

This is a bit strange too.  The heyday of television for the news was prior to the recent period when Gore wanted carbon cap and trade and restrictions on energy use.  Pretty much all but one news network (Fox) have been touting the Progressive line on global warming and the nefarious role of the industrialized humans, anyway.  One would think he might be railing against the Internet, which he invented, for its role in helping to expand opposition to the Democrats cap and trade schemes, disseminating the evidence that the catastrophic global warming claims were false, enlarging the Tea Party revolt, and getting out the information in the Democrat bills they did not want the People to know about until after they became law.  Oh, but of course, he cannot rail against the Internet, because he invented it!  Then, it is curious that he talks about exploitation of the ignorant and easily victimized People in the same sentence in which he tells us that calling the Progressive program "socialist" is unfair.  I still find the very words exploitation and solidarity sickening after decades of hearing them pour out of the mouths of socialists, Marxists, and communists!

Now the elitist Progressive comes forth strongly again:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

Yes, of course, we cannot allow the People to make their own choices in the free market, because we must use the force of government to redeem these sorry sinners.  We, the elitist Progressives, must use the force of government to enforce myriad laws to make the People do what they will not choose to do individually in their own lives.  Of course, many of them are not college educated and many who are did not go to Ivy League quality universities, so we brilliant and well-studied elite will so manipulate the government that these unwashed peasants will do as we tell them to, while we all pretend this was democratically decided.  The People will not make the right personal choices, so we will deceive them into thinking they made the very laws which they would not obey except for the fact that the government will force them to do so.  Government must constrain the private sector to redeem the sinning People.  Government is the Messiah or the elitists who manipulate its levers are the Messiahs.

This sort of manipulation has been going on for a long time.  For most of this time, this caused many people simply to feel disenfranchised.  But, finally, the people became angry about it and they decided they had to do something about being taken advantage of by those who manipulated the levers of government in order to redeem them from the things and actions they loved.  The People have responded with the Tea Party movement.  It is now clear that very many of the People have seen through the Al Gores, John Kerrys, Obamas, Pelosis, Reids, Waxmans, and their ilk.

Perhaps the day of big government redeeming the People will finally come to an end and the People will finally redeem their government.  To do that, they must force it to obey the Constitution, which will take some doing.  But once you see through the obscurantism of the Gores, this becomes a lot easier.  The man behind the curtain has finally been seen and he is not impressive at all.

What is Progressivism?

"progressivism." Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (24 Feb. 2010).

1 : the principles or beliefs of progressives
2 : PROGRESS 4a
3 usually capitalized : the political and economic doctrines advocated by the Progressives
4 : the theories of progressive education -- contrasted with essentialism


OK, that is not very helpful.  So far we know it is some set or sets of principles or beliefs and the progressives who hold these principles or beliefs would like to think they represent some form of progress.  But, the principles and beliefs are apparently defined by those who are progressives.  Who on earth are they?


5 often capitalized : of, relating to, or constituting a political party advocating or associated with the principles of political progressivism

Whoa!  Is this circular or what?  Apparently Progressives do not want to have any limits placed upon their beliefs by anything we could legitimately call principles, or they do not wish to name their principles.  If they had principles, those could be defined, but there may be reasons why they do not want them to be defined.  Arbitrary beliefs cannot be defined and they have an advantage in being very flexible.  Today Progressives believe in minimum wage laws, but if the labor unions were to decide tomorrow that they do not like minimum wage laws, then the principle of minimum wages is tossed aside with no problem.  Today they want to reward the trial lawyers with many extraordinary awards of punitive damages in medical malpractice lawsuits, but if the trial lawyers fail to deliver enough political contributions, why then the Progressive is free to believe in tort reform, at least if the insurance companies give them more political contributions for the purpose than the trial lawyers do.

How marvelous it is to be assured that you are for progress and you are free to believe in anything you wish to believe in.  How confining it is to actually be a man of principle.  How much more freedom one has by being a woman without principles.  It is so much more practical to have no principles.  It is great to be a pragmatist and an opportunist.  Today, it is good to advocate alternative energy development by government subsidies and mandates and high fossil fuel prices, but if the ground falls out from under the catastrophic man-made global warming alarm story and the People wake up to the foolish economics of alternative energy and balk at the high cost of fossil fuels under Progressive controls, well the Progressives can simply change their beliefs to some other vague and not-yet-understood to be unsound program, which sounds plausibly like progress.


When Obama campaigned to become President, he kept saying over and over that he was for change.  Indeed, he is.  He wants to diminish the role of Capitalism and increase the role of government.  He wants to increase the central planning of government and take away the individual decisions that characterize the free markets of the private sector.  He wants to diminish those few restrictions on government power still recognized as being required by our Constitution and replace them with a more powerful Presidency and Congress.  He wants the President and Congress to have more control over the People.  These are the only changes for which he and the Progressives consistently stand.


There is a remaining program for change, however.  That program has no principles to guide it and it has no defining characteristic, except that it is a constantly changing program of claims which vaguely sound to many people as though the Progressives are trying to improve our society in some collective sense.  In fact, the particular claims are not important.  They are just whatever seems to motivate some people to back the Progressives themselves for a period of time.  The Progressives figure out what increase in government power can be used to buy the votes of a block of voters and they find a rationale for that program.  The rationale can be very flimsy and can be understood to be wrong by those who have expertise in the given area.  For instance, the Progressive is for those minimum wage laws that increase unemployment among the young and the handicapped and in the more remote rural areas of the country, proclaiming that a man must support his wife and children, so minimum wage must allow for that.  Never mind that minimum wage jobs are usually held only by those in training and who are very poorly educated.  These people will simply not be hired at all as the minimum wage is raised.  Keeping them out of jobs is hardly a good change in keeping with progress, but it is a favored program of the Progressives.


Another favored change with the Progressives is union card check.  This program is such a blatant travesty that little rationale is even offered for it.  No one wants this except union leaders and those politicians who expect they will get larger donations from the unions as the unions increase the number of poor workers who have to give union leaders union dues.  The change is to deprive employees of a secret ballot allowing them to determine who will represent them in wage negotiations.  Who on earth would want that, except the party of Progressives who only want it because they want more money to use in elections to gain more government power to gain more control over the People.


It is clear that it is not quite the case that Progressives have no principles.  They do have one principle.  They stand for more government power so the government can have more control over the lives, bodies, property, income, character, and actions of the People.  Some of those Progressives simply want the power of being in control, while others delude themselves with thinking that once they, the college-educated elitists usually, are in control, they will somehow use their power to do good things for the rabble, the trailer trash, the NASCAR fans, those who cling to their guns, religion, and Constitution, and the uneducated.

There are problems with believing this rationale for seeking power to do good.  One problem is all the harm they do to gain the money to gain the power.  Another is the pretense that these elitists know the lives and experiences of the peasants well enough to be able to figure out what is good for them when the Progressive has finally gotten his hands wrapped firmly around the levers of power and no longer has to buy the votes of those who do not care so deeply as the Progressive good souls do.  Another problem is that after decades of fighting to attain the power of government by being an opportunist looking for more power at every turn and dealing with unsavory union leaders and trial lawyers, the well-intended Progressive is very likely to become damaged goods.


Some would claim that the Progressive wants a redistribution of income so that the differences in income and wealth among the People are minimized.  There is usually a claim among the Progressives that they stand for this.  But, when they have exercised power in the U.S., their actions have rarely been consistent with such an idea being taken as a principle.  They have instead been more about picking winners and losers in our society.  Sure, they want high income taxpayers to have high tax rates, but they also want farmers, ethanol refiners, union leaders, trial lawyers, accountants, alternative energy producers, bankers, recyclers, government contractors, and others who are politically connected to have high incomes through subsidies, mandates, and make-work programs.  Meanwhile, they pile on the taxes and while many of these are aimed at the rich or better off, most of those high taxes are passed on to those who need the products and services produced by the more productive people in our society.  These people tend to be those with high incomes and/or great wealth.


In practice, the one single principle of Progressivism is a desire for government to have more power so it will have greater control over the People, while the college educated elite control the government.  Now, our colleges have long been controlled by the Progressives and such jobs as those in publishing are similarly mostly controlled by Progressives.  It is not at all surprising that Merriam-Webster did not name the principle that gives meaning to the words Progressive or Progressivism.  Naming that principle is not helpful to the goals of the Progressives.  It must be kept a bit hidden.  The Progressive is against allowing the individual to choose his own values and to manage his own life in accordance with his freely chosen values.  He is against the Constitution, because that limits the powers of government.  He is against the free market and the freedom of choice that individuals find in the private sector.  But, he is loathe yet to tell us that he is against the individual and his rights.

The Agenda is Primary, Not the Science or the Facts

I have repeatedly pointed out that the government mandates and subsidies for ethanol production from corn and other plant sources were based on claims that net energy would be produced and air pollution would be reduced.  These were false claims and this is now well-known.  Nonetheless, Congress has not enacted new legislation to repeal the bad mistake and eliminate the mandates for ethanol use in gasoline mixtures and the subsidies for its production.  This has not happened even though this situation has driven up food prices, in addition to fuel prices, as another bad consequence.  The reason no needed reform has occurred is because the ethanol laws were actually passed to purchase the votes and to gain campaign money from many farmers and from ethanol producers.  It was a way for politicians to increase their control over parts of the private sector.

The total scientific collapse of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis, has not caused Obama and the progressives (fascist socialists) to back off on promoting alternative energy sources with mandates and subsidies at all.  Obama called for a big push to increase government controls on energy in his State of the Union address.  The EPA still seems bent upon putting draconian controls on CO2 emissions and the use of fossil fuels under the Clean Air Act as well.  The progressive machine moves forward, despite the knowledge that man's CO2 emissions have no more than a trivial effect upon climate.  Why?

The very reason that NOAA dropped out hundreds of temperature reporting stations from the surface temperature records, which reported cooler temperatures than other retained stations did, to make it falsely appear that the earlier warming cycle of the late 1970s and 1980s was continuing, makes it very clear that an agenda was long dominant over any issues of science.  The agenda of the catastrophic man-made global warming scheme was a great desire to gain massive new control over the energy sector of our economy and over all users of energy.  Basically, all American businesses are highly dependent upon energy, which is why sudden price hikes in oil have set off 10 of the 11 recessions since WWII, including the present one.  Those Americans who do not own a company dependent upon energy costs, work for one or still have a residence they must heat and cool.  The power grab by the progressives to take over the control of energy is huge.  That goal remains, whether the science of catastrophic man-made global warming has become laughable or not.

So, the fascist socialist left is not giving up.  They are attempting to make another transition in their claim on power over the American people.  They used to base it entirely on fairness and economic equality, but the fall of the USSR made the claims of central economic planning look pitiful.  Their hollowness was too easily seen in the rapid movement of Eastern Europeans away from communism and socialism.  They had lived in socialism's depressing and deadening grasp.  They fled with elation to Capitalism.  Even the Chinese Communist government realized they had to drop much of their central economic planning.  The fascist socialists in the West adopted environmentalism and global warming as the agenda that would allow them to increase their power over the People.  Now that rationale has fallen apart on the global warming side and the environmental harm exaggerations on many other fronts are more and more being questioned also.  Where can they turn?

The new approach is rather desperate.  The claim is we will run out of fossil fuels, they are dirty, and alternative energy can produce more jobs.  Someday, we will run out of fossil fuels, but they are plentiful and cheap still.  This gives us plenty of time to develop alternative energy and there is no reason for pell-mell crash programs.  The free market will develop the new energy as it is needed.  Let companies drill in the American waters and in national forests and allow them to develop oil shale, as it makes sense.  Let them also use wind generation, solar, and geothermal power as they can find and develop markets for them.  There is no need for huge, wasteful government programs.  The evolution of technology will be much more efficient at its private sector pace.  As for cleanliness, we have already made huge strides in cleaning up our fossil fuel use.  A rationally paced program to continue such work will be wiser again than any crash program.  The real problems with pollution are in the poorer countries of the world and the solution is to bring the highly efficient Capitalist system to them, so they can afford to clean up their countries, as we have cleaned up the U.S.  Will alternative energy produce new jobs?  Yes, but we want it to produce net new jobs.  A government policy of killing coal miners, oil drillers, railroad, and energy-using industry jobs in massive numbers to create a pittance of new alternative energy jobs, is a fool's errand.

But, of course, I am treating the claims of the progressive fascist socialists as though they are motivated by a respect for reason.  They are not.  They are motivated by a desire to control the lives of others.  They want to tell every American what his values should be and then give him a strict set of rules to manage his life.  We are all to be the slaves of the college-educated elite of progressive fascist socialists who want to control us.  They are to be our rulers, our tyrants supreme.  Are we going to allow this?  I do not think so.  I think we are about to start throwing these rascals out of government in droves!  But, it is clear that they will never stop seeking to rule us and if we are to be free, we must never stop fighting this ravenous beast of fascist socialism.