We Bank our Labor as Property

David Boaz recently wrote a commentary titled Bill de Blasio is America's Marxist Mayor and he quoted Mayor de Blasio as saying:

What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development….

Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see, and I think what we have, in this city at least, are people who would love to have the New Deal back, on one level. They’d love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality.

Despite his Marxist desire to have the government control all property, Bill de Blasio has easily won selection by the Democrat Party to run again on their ticket for Mayor of New York City.

Property can be viewed as a way to store or bank the value of one's own labor. To claim that an individual has no right to the property that results from his labor is really just a way to deny ownership of one's own labor. If we do not own our own labor then we also do not own the time or the effort we devote to our labor. The very essence of living for the individual human being is the management of one's own activity including the most important activities of labor which provide us the means to maintain and secure our own life. Without the control of our own saved labor as property, we become subject to every vagary of life, including those of fickle government.

Deprived of our stored labor in the form of property, every fickle decision by committed socialists such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Mayor Bill de Blasio has the potential to be one of whether each individual will live or die. To give them this power is to forfeit all individual control over our lives, making each and every individual a slave to their whims.

Judge Neil Gorsuch Says the Declaration of Independence Is Not Foundational Law

Under questioning by Ben Sasse, Republican Senator from Nebraska, Judge Neil Gorsuch said that the Constitution is the foundational law.  The Declaration of Independence is not, though it is informative of the background of the Constitution and should not be lightly discarded.  Unfortunately, Judge Gorsuch did not discuss the fact that the Declaration of Independence is the primary statement of the philosophy behind the Constitution.  He neglected to say that the Declaration of Independence is the American document that defines the legitimate purpose of government -- the protection of the rights of the individual.

It is the Declaration of Independence that makes it clear that sovereignty resides in the individual, not in government.  Government exists to serve the sovereign individual, the holder of rights.  The individual and his rights exist whether government does or not.  Government does not define individual rights.  It is the nature of man and his need to survive and flourish in life that define individual rights.  An understanding of this is absolutely necessary to make it possible for government to fulfill its legitimate purpose in protecting everyone's individual rights.

The Bill of Rights enumerated some individual rights.  Yet that same document, in the 9th Amendment, made it crystal clear that the enumeration of individual rights was incomplete and that the federal government was not "to deny or disparage the other rights retained by the people." Unfortunately, the federal courts have attributed almost no protections to individual rights under this 9th Amendment, having virtually ignored the broad scope of individual rights acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence as those of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The 14th Amendment also recognizes the broad individual rights of citizens: "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Absent the context of preexisting and preeminent individual rights, the protections of those rights by the government are bound to be haphazard at best.  More likely, the government itself will become the greatest threat to individual rights.  The fact that the Declaration of Independence is not considered a foundational document in the law drastically undermines our understanding of the purpose of government, its proper limits, and the effectiveness of the Constitution to fulfill its contract with the people to provide "a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, ..."

It is very disturbing when politicians and judges prove themselves to be rudderless before their essential and only task of protecting individual rights.  There is no way that a knowledge of these individual rights is or can be spelled out by a few short documents.  The Constitution is itself a given document whose meaning is the Law of the Land.  It is not a changing or living document and it must be interpreted in accordance with its original meaning.  When and if one cannot do that, it should be amended.

What is living and evolving is our understanding of individual rights.  The Constitution literally makes it clear that we are to see to it that the government protects everyone's equal individual rights as these rights are understood in terms of man's nature and the reality in which he lives.  The use of this understanding of man's rights is not a matter of changing the meaning of the Constitution.  Its meaning was always to provide a very limited government whose purpose was the protection of individual rights.  There is no other interpretation of the Constitution which is self-consistent, rational, and legitimate.

Freedom of speech has evolved since the time of the Constitution's adoption as the Law of the Land. It still means that one has the right to say what one wants to those within hearing range, but it also now means that one has the freedom to buy a radio or a television station and say what one wants through that medium, or that one can say what one wants in a video posted to You Tube.  Similarly, property and labor rights have evolved in many ways to include new forms of contracts and new forms of intellectual property.  It has come to be recognized that domestic partnership contracts have to equally recognize the partnerships of two people of the same sex, as well as those of two people of the opposite sex.  Not to do so is a violation of the principle of the equal protection of individual rights necessary to the right to pursue one's happiness.  One can only hope that our broad right to freedom of association will one day be more recognized than it is now.  As these changes have occurred and will continue to occur in our real lives, the 9th and 14th Amendments should be constant as sources of the justification for protecting these individual rights. No change in the Constitution is needed to protect individual rights, despite their evolving nature.

To be clear:  I am not a believer in a living Constitution.  I believe that it is our understanding of individual rights that is changing.  To some degree, those individual rights are themselves evolving as the conditions of man's existence in reality change.  Most of that change is the result of man using his rational faculty to improve and control the world in which he lives.  We need judges throughout our judicial system who understand that the Constitution itself should be interpreted literally and always in such a manner as to maximize the protection of individual rights.  These same judges should be open to understanding our individual rights and prepared to expand their range.  It is not the Constitution which is the primary basis for rational law.  The primary basis is the protection of individual rights.  The Constitution is an important and critical tool to limit the powers of government and to direct its actions toward the equal protection of every citizen's many and broad individual rights.  This is the critical context for all valid constitutional law -- indeed for any valid law.

It is sadly the case that Judge Neil Gorsuch seems to defer too much to any existing law and any prior interpretation of the law whether or not they violate these principles of legitimate government.  It appears that Justice Clarence Thomas will remain the best of the Supreme Court justices.

Europe, Where Mineral Rights Belong to the State, Cannot Frack

In most of Europe, the mineral property rights and sub-surface property rights of land belong to the state, not the landowner.  Consequently, the landowner is only hurt if minerals or oil or natural gas are extracted from his property.  This makes it politically impractical to extract minerals or oil or gas from most of the land. 

Consequently, the hydraulic fracturing now common in the United States is not helping the Europeans at all to free themselves from a heavy dependence on Russian natural gas.  Because of fracking, made possible by mineral rights ownership being commonly in the hands of the landowner in the U.S., the United States passed Russia in the production of both oil and natural gas last year.  But Europe remains in a state of dependence on Russian natural gas.  The most dependent countries are those of Eastern Europe such as the Baltic countries, Ukraine, and Poland, which Russia pressured in 2006, 2009, and 2015 with reductions or interruptions in their natural gas supply.

Why I Refuse to Sign the United Nations Global Compact

As owner and president of a materials characterization and failure analysis laboratory, one of my customers has stated that I must sign the United Nations Global Compact if they are to continue doing business with us thanks to one of their biggest customers who is requiring this of them.  The summary of that U.N. Global Compact is very vague but is intended to lock companies into a very extensive plan that will greatly change our way of life and limit our freedoms.  It follows:

The Ten Principles  

The UN Global Compact's ten principles in the areas of human rights, labour, the environment and anti-corruption enjoy universal consensus and are derived from:

• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• The International Labour Organization's Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work
• The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development
• The United Nations Convention Against Corruption

The UN Global Compact asks companies to embrace, support and enact, within their sphere of influence, a set of core values in the areas of human rights, labour standards, the environment and anti-corruption:

Human Rights

• Principle 1: Businesses should support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights; and
• Principle 2: make sure that they are not complicit in human rights abuses.  

Labour

• Principle 3: Businesses should uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining;
• Principle 4: the elimination of all forms of forced and compulsory labour;
• Principle 5: the effective abolition of child labour; and
• Principle 6: the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation. 
   

Environment

• Principle 7: Businesses should support a precautionary approach to environmental challenges;
• Principle 8: undertake initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility; and
• Principle 9: encourage the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies.   

Anti-Corruption

• Principle 10: Businesses should work against corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery.

I am refusing to sign this compact because of its moral, civic, and scientific errors.  I expect to lose a customer, but one of the main reasons I founded my company was to be free of association with an organization as an employee whose moral behavior did not meet with my standards.  Generally, when I take on work from a client company now, I can do so without subjecting myself to its moral imperfections and I can more easily refuse to work with any company whose standards are known by me to be too low.  As a result, I sleep well and remain calm and happy.

I will explain my objections to each of the three categories: Human Rights, Labor, and Environment in this U.N. Global Compact.

Human Rights:

The problem here is that the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not understand what a human right is.  It correctly names many human rights, but it also claims that there is a body of human rights which require that services and goods must be delivered to every individual at the expense of the labor of others who may not be willing participants.  For instance, by right every child may demand that others throughout a nation may be forced to educate that child.  This is a form of slavery, though of a limited nature.  It is nonetheless a violation of the rights of individuals.  One of the very reasons that education is critically important is so that the citizen understands his rights and learns how to assert and protect them.  The process of becoming educated should not require trampling on the rights of others to life, liberty, and the pursuit of their own happiness.

Articles 1 - 13:  I agree with them.

Article 14:  I do not agree that asylum is a right, though I do agree that it is good practice for the USA to offer it.

Articles 15 - 21:  I agree with them.

Article 22:  This does not have a clear meaning, but I suspect it is a misunderstanding of rights, especially because rights pertain to an individual and arise from the nature of man, not from society and culture as implied here.  It seems likely this is interpreted by most to imply that some people have the right to demand goods and services or income from others to maintain their own "social security."

Article 23:

"(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment."  Well, no.  Employment is like happiness and one is not able to claim it from others by right, but only to be free to be self-employed or to work out a free trade of one's work for employment with an employer.  If one does not think the employment conditions are just or favorable, then one can leave the job.  One should be free to purchase unemployment insurance from a willing provider should there be one, but one is not free to impose the costs of unemployment on others by the use of force.

"(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection."  No again.  How can a person who works for himself be guaranteed clients without violating the rights of the clients?  A person who works for an employer may or may not add enough to the income of the employer for him to provide the worker with an income sufficient to ensure his and his family's existence worthy of human dignity.  So, ultimately, this provision requires others in the society to provide this worker with goods and services or income that will allow his and his family's survival with human dignity.  This can only be accomplished by violating the rights of others.  In particular, it violates a large number of the rights this very document pretends to protect.  Who even knows what that requirement for minimal human dignity is when phrased in such a context?  I think human dignity is achieved when one is capable of sustaining one's own life through one's own efforts to think rationally and to apply that thought to securing and flourishing life.  Others are not responsible for providing the human dignity that only one's own efforts can achieve.  One has a right to pursue human dignity, not to be provided it.

Article 24:  "Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay."  Yes, everyone has a right to seek rest and leisure, but no one else is obliged to provide him with the means to rest and to take his leisure.  Neither government nor society have any business limiting the right to contract or to earn a living by imposing limits on working hours or requiring an employer to provide pay for holidays.  If an individual wants these things, he is obliged to provide them to himself as a self-employed person or to work out a mutually and voluntarily agreed upon contract with an employer.

Article 25:

"(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."  Like happiness, everyone has the right to pursue these objectives, but no one else is obliged to provide them.  No one would have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if they are required to provide these values and services to everyone else who may need them, even if for reasons beyond their control.  This is just a way of saying you are free, unless someone else needs you to serve them.  Someone else is always needy and some of them for reasons which governments do not find it convenient to acknowledge to be due to their own lack of effort and foresight.  Those who have planned their lives poorly and make little effort to secure their own lives have no right to enslave those who are better off than themselves simply by virtue of their need.  Of course there are many good reasons why those who are well off may choose to act benevolently toward others in need, but they should not be responding to fulfilling the rights of others at the loss of their own rights.  The benefactor should be free to decide for himself who he will provide charity to and how he will do so.  He is also free to provide no charity to anyone.  Once again, this provision is contradictory to many earlier valid rights in this document.

"(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection."  This is a worthy viewpoint, but it confers no rights.  Once again, it implies obligations of service contradictory to real and valid rights if it had the status of a right.

Article 26:

" (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit."  Once again, everyone has the right to pursue an education, but no one else can be obliged to provide that education without depriving them of their rights.  Education is important and it is worthy of great consideration for charitable giving, but there is no right to have it.

"(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace." Education should be devoted to the development of rational thinking skills and to an understanding of rights as a non-contradictory freedom of action and thought needed by every individual to sustain their life in security and to flourish in life.  The U.N. has shown that its concept of rights is contradictory.  While it is ultimately to be hoped that everyone will be able to at least live in peace with one another, this possibility is not independent of the actual beliefs prevalent in some nations or in some religious ideas.  It is certainly not independent of peoples respect for real human rights either.

Article 27:  I agree with this one.

Article 28:  "Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized." This is wrong for the above reasons.

Article 29:  "(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.  (2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society."  To the degree that a community of people actually do protect the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, one does have a duty to that community, but it is unwise to make that duty enforceable by law.  The exercise of duties should be voluntary, not forced.  The general welfare of a society is only achieved by the thorough and non-contradictory protection of individual rights.  This is only possible when rights are properly understood as endowing a freedom of action upon an individual and not an obligation of service to others.  The U.N. clearly does not understand this.

Article 30:  "Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein."  In the name of securing my own real rights as an individual, I must object to the false U.N. declaration that I can be compelled to provide goods and services to others in the name of false and contradictory rights.

Labor:

Principle 3: Businesses should uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining  This statement is internally self-contradictory, at least in the context of how it is meant.  Every individual has a broad right to freedom of association.  This applies to business owners, managers, and non-management employees.  Employees have the right to organize to perform collective bargaining, but owners and managers cannot be obliged to give up their own freedom of association by being required to come to an agreement with such an employee bargaining unit.  They are equally free not to employ those individuals who engaged in the collective bargaining, which is contrary to the intent of the U.N. and to unjust laws in the USA.

Principle 4: the elimination of all forms of forced and compulsory labour  I agree with this.

Principle 5: the effective abolition of child labour  I agree with this.

Principle 6: the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation  Some types of discrimination are necessary in hiring, such as discriminating in favor of intelligent and hard-working employees who allow a company to add enough income that it can thrive.  Because the U.N. proved such an unthinking instrument with respect to human rights, I cannot trust that its concept of proper and improper discrimination is correct.  I do not believe either racial or gender discrimination makes sense in a business.  There are however ideas that some individuals have which are highly corrosive to trust and confidence and they do justify discrimination.

Environment:

• Principle 7: Businesses should support a precautionary approach to environmental challenges;
• Principle 8: undertake initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility; and
• Principle 9: encourage the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies.  

I would agree to these if

• "precautionary approach" were "rational precautionary approach" and that rational precaution covered precautions against needlessly causing human beings misery, such as forcing them out of coal mining jobs, coal-fired power plant jobs, or to pay much higher electricity costs and to risk freezing in severe winters when wind and solar power would fail them.
• "promote environmental responsibility" recognized that at some point one is doing enough
• and if this were not taken to be an agenda determined by the U.N. rather than me.

My laboratory is constantly engaged in helping clients to use and process their materials to minimize environmental harm, while raising the standard of living of human beings.  I am confident that the private sector can manage this process very well and that it will continue to turn to my laboratory for materials characterizations critical to this progress.

Key U.N. Documents Cited on the Environment:

• The Rio Declaration - a statement of 27 principles upon which nations agreed to base their actions in dealing with environmental and development issues. The Rio Declaration built on the previous Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment which was adopted in Stockholm in 1972. The Stockholm conference was the first global environmental meeting of governments, which stated that long-term economic progress needs to be linked with environmental protection.
• Agenda 21 - a 40 chapter, action blueprint on specific issues relating to sustainable development that emerged from the Rio Summit. Agenda 21 explained that population, consumption and technology were the primary driving forces of environmental change and for the first time, at an international level, explicitly linked the need for development and poverty eradication with progress towards sustainable development
• The 'Brundtland Report', 'Our Common Future' which was produced in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development, also laid the foundations for the Environment Principles. This landmark document highlighted that people needed to change the way they lived and did business or face unacceptable levels of human suffering and environmental damage.

While the Rio Conference led to a great deal of discussion of restrictions on CO2 emissions, the statement of 27 principles in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development do not mention any specific pollutant or threat to the environment.  This surprised me.  But knowing that the U.N. has a very different idea of what these threats are from my own still gives me great concern about signing on with the U.N.  Indeed, the vagueness is useful to get people to sign on to the agenda and to allow planners and other government bureaucrats maximum flexibility in implementing their ever-tightening limitations on human activities and property use in the name of the environment.

Agenda 21 is a huge document that arose from the 1992 Rio Conference.  It is also largely an effort to use government planning, often at the local level, to restrict land use and to force people to live in more dense communities with much more land further outside of towns left fallow or agricultural.  As such, Agenda 21 limits property rights, economic development, drives up housing costs, and encourages government subsidies for lower income persons as a bribe to get them to move into more crowded developments.  There is no good reason for governments to so limit individual choices and to inhibit the free use of land and capital resources.

While not much discussed explicitly in the summary portions of Agenda 21 or the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, it is clear the U.N. is eager to lump its failed hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming into its precautionary protection scheme and its claims for the nature of sustainable development.  I have written many posts on the bad physics behind the claims that CO2 emissions will cause warming at a catastrophic level or even a significant level.  I have written many posts on the wrongful manipulation of the temperature record to make the temperature appear to rise at a more significant rate than it has.  I have also written about how the actual predictions of the U.N. endorsed climate models have failed, most especially in predicting a continued rise in temperature over the last 17 years which has not occurred.

See for example my articles going back through 2013 on the fallacies of CAGW as pushed by the U.N., the U.S. government, and many other governments:

Simple Explanation of Why Greenhouse Gases Do Not Warm the Earth's Surface 

Maintaining Climate Change Alarmism: Replacing Cool Weather Station Data with Warm Station Data 

AGW Theory: Back Radiation Insignificant for Surface Temperature

Mann v. Steyn to Determine if Opinion Contrary to Government Science is Permitted

Governmental Exaggeration of the Increase in Global Temperature 

The Anti-Science IPCC Global Warming Report 5

Claims of Long Life for Man's CO2 Emissions in Atmosphere are False 

The Unsettled Science of Global Warming Revealed by the Climate Models

NASA Alters Iceland Temperature Record to Produce Warming

NOAA Surface Temperature Changes Show Little Correlation to CO2 Changes Since 1880

Earth Surface Cooled from 1982 to 2006 According to Satellite Data

United Nations Does Not Take Global Warming Seriously

What if the Atmosphere had no Greenhouse Gases?

The Stefan-Boltzmann Law at a Non-Vacuum Interface: Misuse by Global Warming Alarmists

A Hypothetical Earth Atmosphere of Carbon Dioxide and Comments on Vertical Mixing

The Earth Surface Temperature without Greenhouse Gases: The Shade Effect of Infra-Red Active Gases

An Unsettling Removal of Atmospheric CO2 by Plankton

Do All Atmospheric Gases Absorb and Emit Electromagnetic Radiation?

Is the Earth Still Warming?

The Ocean Acidification Myth

CO2 Increases Lag Temperature Since 1982

The Unsettled Earth Energy Budget

The Most Essential Physics of the Earth's Temperature

Infrared-Absorbing Gases and the Earth's Surface Temperature 

Blackbody Radiation and the Consensus Greenhouse Gas Theory

Jack Rakove: Revolutionaries - A New History of the Invention of America

One of my greatest concerns is that few Americans know very much about American history.  Most are especially ignorant of American history covering the period of the 1700s, when Americans generally came to believe in the American Principle of highly limited government devoted only to the protection of the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own mind, body, and labor, and to the pursuit of happiness.  Few Americans today seem to understand that my explanation of individual rights is especially redundant, because at that time most Americans would have expressed the same idea as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness or as life, liberty, and property.

I am finding considerable pleasure in reading Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America by Jack Rakove, the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and a professor of political science at Stanford University.  This will not be a general effort to review the book, since I am still in the process of reading it.  Instead, I am going to offer an interesting quote from the book.

Professor Rakove discusses the role of the moderates in the period leading up to the Declaration of Independence.  The men he focuses on in this group are from the Middle Atlantic colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland who were especially interested in the constructive economic development of America as entrepreneurs.  He names the business partners Robert Morris and Thomas Willing of Pennsylvania and the lawyer they sometimes hired, James Wilson; John Jay, James Duane, Robert Livingston, and Gouverneur Morris of New York; William Livingston of New Jersey; and Thomas Johnson and Charles Carroll of Carrollton of Maryland as belonging to this group.  He points out that moderate did not mean that they were just relatively undecided between the more radical patriots such as Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Richard Henry Lee and the Loyalists, but that they had their own very definite viewpoint.  They were men of property, from that part of America with the most diverse population which might be torn apart in war, they understood that the colonies had much to benefit from the use of British capital, and they were appalled by Britain's rejection of their efforts to promote accommodation with an "obstinate commitment to repression and force."

This strong commitment to the productive development and improvement of property helped distinguish the moderate political leaders of the middle colonies from their counterparts from other regions.  Yet there was a deeper sense in which their attachment to the rights of property identified a value that all Americans shared.  For property was one of the strongest words of the Anglo-American political vocabulary.  Its security from unlawful taxation had been a dominant value of their common constitutional culture since the previous century.  John Locke had grounded an entire theory of government -- and the right to resist tyranny -- on the concept of property in his Second Treatise of Government.  But Locke only gave philosophical rigor to a belief that already permeated Anglo-American law and politics.

For Locke, as for his American readers, the concept of property encompassed not only the objects a person owned but also the ability, indeed the right, to acquire them.  Just as men had a right to their property, so they held a property in their rights.  Men did not merely claim their rights, but also owned them, and their title to their liberty was as sound as their title to the land or to the tools with which they earned their livelihood.  Furthermore, Americans believed that they truly owned these rights because their ancestors had fairly purchased them through the arduous work of colonization.  Just as Locke had grounded his theory of property on the labor through which men expropriate the fruits of nature for their personal use, making the earth more productive and thus fulfilling the divine injunction to preserve mankind, so the colonists looked back to their ancestor's pioneering and saw that it was good -- and legal too.  Property was a birthright, a legal entitlement and material legacy that one industrious generation transmitted to another. ... Property, defined in this way, was the vital right that Parliament would infringe upon, even destroy, if it made good its claim to legislate for Americans "in all cases whatsoever."

I have quoted this because modern Americans do not understand that our most fundamental property is in the ownership of our rights, our bodies, our minds, and our labor and the fruits of that labor.  The concept of such property was and is central to the understanding of the American Principle.  If we do not understand this, then we will surely be ruled by tyrannical government and be reduced to serfs.

We must understand that the General Welfare of our Constitution was not a fulfillment of the wishes of some fraction, possibly occasionally a majority, of Americans to take the property of others for their benefit, but an assertion that government was to secure the property each of us has in our individual rights and all that implies.  The General Welfare therefore does not imply and require that the People go to war with some among them, but implies quite the opposite.  We the People and our government must respect the property right that each and every American has in his individual rights.  Only then is the General Welfare secured.

An outline of my approach to reviving the economy

In mentioning that the Obama economy made it much more difficult for small businesses such as my materials analysis laboratory to continue to operate, a scientist with whom I had been corresponding about his analytical needs claimed that no one could do the job of reviving the economy better than Obama.  He then asked what I would do.  Here is my 13-point reply with minor embellishments:


1)  Kill ObamaUncaringTax, too nicely called ObamaCare.

2)  Kill the Dodd-Frank Too-Big-to-Fail Act which is stultifying the loan markets and setting up the next colossal financial bubble.

3)  Enforce the work requirement on government charity programs and begin rapidly phasing them out.  The private sector can pick up whatever programs it wants to.

4)  Stop the EPA's vendetta against the use of coal.  The mercury and other pollution arguments are greatly exaggerated and really mostly an excuse to act on the failed hypothesis that man's CO2 emissions are causing a catastrophic global warming.

5)  Recognizing that the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is wrong, stop discouraging other fossil fuel use and freely allow the development of new sources of oil and gas. Open up leases on federal land and offshore for development.  End federal subsidies and mandates for green energy development. 

6) Kill the federal CAFE requirement for 54.5 mpg by 2025 or any other date.

7)  Authorize the building of the Keystone XL pipeline so the Gulf of Mexico refineries are fed plenty of Bakken shale oil and Albertan tar sands oil.

8)  Increase the retirement age for Social Security and the coverage age for Medicare.

9)  Eliminate the Dept. of Education, the Dept. of Energy, the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, the Labor Dept., most of the functions of the Dept. of Health and Human Services, the Agriculture Dept., reduce the Dept. of the Interior, eliminate the Transportation Dept., and reduce the Dept. of Homeland Security.  Fold the legitimate functions of the Labor, Agriculture, and Transportation Departments into the Commerce Dept.  Eliminate corporate welfare programs in the Commerce Dept., as well as the labor union welfare programs now in the Labor Dept.  Kill the Davis-Bacon Act and federal requirements that union wages be paid on federal contracts.

10)  Convert the Medicare program into a defined benefits program so that Medicare patients care about how much they spend and will not allow overcharging.  All government fraud, waste, and abuse programs are a pretense and are only used selectively to occasionally prosecute someone who is not playing the game to the liking of the powers that be in government.

11)  Sell most of the federal lands with mineral rights and use payments to pay down the debt.  The main purpose of this is to see that the land will be used more productively.

12)  Convert the Social Security program over time from a Ponzi scheme to a tax-deferred personal investment program with the investment truly held by the investing individual.

13) Reduce tax revenues as drastic spending cuts are enacted and simplify the tax laws and codes.  Preferably move to consumption taxes as opposed to taxes that inhibit production.  Consumption taxes will eliminate almost all reporting of financial information to the government.  Eliminate Sarbanes-Oxley.  Government spending will be quickly reduced to 18% or less of GDP and then cuts will continue until it is no more than 10% of GDP.  The economy will grow by leaps and bounds as the cost of government is kept growing somewhere between the rate of population increase and the rate of GDP increase, but definitely significantly less than the rate of GDP increase.

That is the gist of my program to transform the American economy consistent with the American Principle of government limited to the protection of our equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of our minds, bodies, and labor, and the pursuit of happiness.  The key to the preservation of our rights is a rich and vibrant private sector where we are free to pursue our own values, to trade goods, services, and ideas, and to associate with others of our choice for the purposes of our choice.

There are many other reforms needed to fully protect all of the rights of the individual.  Some of these will have major economic implications as well.  For instance, all education should become private education.  It is not the business of the government to educate the people, since that would be an infringement of the rights of many and government has a very serious conflict-of-interest problem with respect to teaching about its legitimate functions, about ethical matters that must enter into issues affecting the freedom of conscience of the People, and about the history of failure of big government and the success of highly limited government.  Much more needs to be done to protect privacy, the freedom of movement, freedom of speech and the written word whether in press or on the Internet, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of contract, freedom of trade and the ownership of one's own labor and its fruits, the freedom to create a domestic partnership contract with any consenting adults of one's choice, and the freedom of property ownership, including that in one's mind and body.

17 Countries Now Have More Economic Freedom than the USA

The Economic Freedom of the World: 2012 Annual Report published by the Fraser Institute measured the economic freedom of countries using the data of 2010.  The principal authors of the report are James Gwartney of  Florida State University, Robert Lawson of Southern Methodist University, and Joshua Hall of Beloit College with contributions from eight other academics.

The economic freedom evaluation of the USA continued its nearly monotonic decline since the year 2000.  In 2000 we had a rating of 8.65 on a scale of 10.00, but we have sunk to a rating of 7.70 now.  Since the year 2000, the rest of the world has seen a small increase in rating from 6.71 to 6.83.  In 2010, our 8.65 rating of the year 2000 would have made the USA a close third to Singapore, with Hong Kong number one.  But in our state of degradation as of 2010, the USA is now disgracefully 18th in the world in economic freedom.  When the evaluation is made for 2012, we will find that we have slid much further down the list.

Here is what the world looks like color coded by quartile in economic freedom:

You can see why Mexicans have been coming across the border illegally to work in the USA from this map.  I was not surprised to see Venezuela and maybe even Argentina in the least free quartile, but I was surprised to see India there.

Here are the ratings and the rankings of the upper two quartiles:

These economic freedom ratings are made based on the following criteria with the individual USA ratings and rankings following each:

1) Size of government (6.43, 73rd, our worst major category ranking)

2) Legal system and property rights (7.14, 28th)

3) Sound money (9.68, 7th)

4) Freedom to trade internationally (7.46, 57th)

5) Regulation (7.76, 31st)

Regulation is further broken down into the following subcategories:

a) Credit market regulations (6.95, 121st, our worst regulatory ranking)

b) Labor market regulations (9.06, 3rd)

c) Business regulations (7.26, 30th)

If we evaluate which areas of economic freedom are most pulling our ranking down in order, they are:

Size of government, 73rd
Freedom to trade internationally, 57th
Regulation, 31st
Legal system and property rights, 28th

in which areas our ranking was worse than our overall ranking. Note that our size of government ranking of 73rd puts us at the top of the list of nations in the third quartile.  That is in the lower half of the 144 nations evaluated.  Does that hurt your pride?  It should.  It should be excruciating pain.  Personally, I find each of these rankings to be disgraceful and a source of great anger.

Our economic freedoms are as basic as any other freedoms.  To sustain our lives, we need to be free to earn a living.  We also need to be free to enjoy earning our living without having burdens constantly loaded on our backs such as heavy taxes and unnecessary regulations and paperwork requirements.  The American businessman sees his business drained by excessive taxes, is forced to be an unpaid tax collector, is forced to divulge much too much private information, is forced to assume responsibilities and risks that are properly either those of his employees or his customers, is kept from doing things according to his own judgment by laws that are often irrational, and is forced to comply with unintelligible and excessively voluminous rules and regulations.

The American businessman is treated like a slave of the state and generally forced into being a criminal by laws and regulations he cannot even read, cannot understand, and in many cases could not abide by if he understood them.  This is exactly what a great many politicians want.  They want to extort tax money, favors, and campaign contributions at will from businessmen.  They use the overly complex and voluminous law and the threat of still more laws and regulations to make most businessmen cower before them.

There are very practical consequences for our economy.  As our economic freedoms are lost, our ability to grow our real per capita GDP decreases.  See the graph I have prepared from World Bank data for the years from 1980 to 2011:

Note that the post-2000 performance is clearly much worse than that of 2000 and earlier.  A loss of economic freedom is a loss of opportunity and an increase in uncertainty.  With less opportunity and more uncertainty, fewer people will start start-up companies and fewer people will be hired by such companies:

George W. Bush grew government and added many regulations, but Obama has grown government even more and added slightly more regulations and many more very expensive regulations.  With many more regulations awaiting a second term and hopes for many tax increases, Obama intends to further degrade our economic freedoms in the name of redistribution and a wrongheaded claim that catastrophic man-made global warming will result if he does not drastically cut our fossil fuel energy use.  If he is re-elected, he will attempt to greatly further decrease our economic freedoms.

Third-World Property Rights in California

California is well-known for its high taxes, high deficits, never-ending regulations, its coddled government employees, its poor schools despite spending twice the national average per student, its building restrictions and high property costs, its high level of domestic out-migration to other states, and its third-world property rights.  California is one of the states that still allows governments to seize private property for private use virtually without restriction.  National outrage following the Supreme Court decision to allow New London, Connecticut to seize the Kelo home and neighborhood for proposed private use brought reforms in many states and local governments to reign in such abuse of property rights recognized in our Constitution.  The land seized from its rightful owners in the Kelo case is now a vacant wasteland.  Similar vacant wastelands have resulted in troubled California owing to similar eminent domain abuse of private property for private, connected company gain.

Third-world property rights are one of the worst impediments to economic growth and the standard of living in third-world countries.  California, with all its woes, has opted for property rights uncertainty to replicate those destructive effects upon ownership and investment right here in our most populated state.  Tim Cavanaugh gave some examples at reason.com:

But the acres of south Los Angeles wasteland generated by the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles (CRA/LA), the state’s largest and wealthiest RDA, are a grim testament to failure. The agency’s Normandie 5 Redevelopment Project has generated zero development. Its 107-acre Watts Project area, which has been in effect since 1968, boasts nothing but a Food 4 Less that hardly required government help to come into being. The massive $163 million Marlton Square project has stagnated, unbuilt, for nearly 20 years as a shady developer with friends in City Hall looted taxpayer funds. The two-block project area at the corner of Vermont and Manchester Avenues is a vacant lot. So is the long-fallow Central/Slauson project, where the CRA used eminent domain to shut down a metal works that was the only functioning business in the area.

 He also notes that the people attracted to such government property seizure schemes are not the best people:

Maybe the most important factor is the tendency of public-private partnerships to attract the worst elements of society: union goons, neighborhood activists, reverends, public-trough developers, political appointees, city planners, and so on. The Marlton Square project came close to breaking ground in 1999 under the legendary Lakers point guard and successful developer Magic Johnson—until itinerant local politician Mark Ridley-Thomas forced Magic out and turned the project over to a developer with a history of bouncing checks and cheating on his taxes, who went on to make millions of city dollars vanish before going bankrupt.

One of the more notable characteristics of these ignoble schemes is that they usually victimize the poor or the lower middle class for the comfort and profit of unscrupulous well-off people with good connections to government.  Fortunately, these would-be victims have a resolute champion in the Institute for Justice, which is making a point of becoming a nemesis for such low-life dispossession in the rascal-ridden state of California.  An example of the work the Institute for Justice does is its defense of a community youth athletic center against the out-of-control use of eminent domain by National City near San Diego.  A cavalier declaration of blight has been issued to 700 properties so that the city can exercise eminent domain over any of the properties over the next ten-year period.  The property owners must successfully fight off the blight rulings within a limited time to save their property from some potential exercise of the eminent domain claim in later years.  This means considerable expense and effort to prevent the loss of their property which may or may not happen.  This arrangement is a most cunning way to cause many property owners to fail to get the blight ruling overturned, especially when they are people of limited financial resources.  This is a plague upon the unwealthy for the future benefit of unscrupulous wealthy developers.

The Institute for Justice and some brave would-be victims have something to say about that however:



You can read more about this worthy case here.  Please consider becoming a supporter of the Institute for Justice while you are there.

If Only the Preamble of the Constitution Said --

While I think the American People who accepted the Constitution of the United States of America thought that the Constitution would be seen by everyone in the context that I have given it more explicitly in my own rewrite of the Preamble, our modern federal courts, legislature, and president do not.  Neither do most of our academics.  If only the Preamble said this explicitly, our individual rights would be much more secure:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.  This Constitution will provide the government a few explicitly enumerated and very limited powers.  The government of the United States of America shall not deny or disparage the equal, sovereign, and many rights of the individual citizens of the United States of America to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

If the Preamble did say this, it would have served as a strong protection against the present broad interpretation of federal government powers and the very narrow interpretation of the scope of individual rights.  This is not to say that an always power-voracious government would not commonly choose to ignore the limits of its power as ours now does.  It does not mean it would not often trample our individual rights and treat them as highly unequal rights as it now does either.  No, our government would likely still be tyrannical, but its road to exercising that tyranny would have been more difficult and it would not be so far down the path of tyranny as it now is.

My 9/12 Protest Sign

My 9/12 Protest sign for the march from the Washington Monument to the Congress has two columns.  The first reads:

Read Ayn Rand!

Legitimate
Government:
•    Has Few Powers
•    Protects the Equal, Sovereign Rights of the Individual to Life, Liberty, Property, & the Pursuit of Happiness
•    Implied Individual Rights are Many
Individual Rights:
•    Constitutional Rights
•    Ownership of Body
•    Right to Earn a Living & Use Income
•    Freedom of Conscience
•    Freedom to be Left Alone & of Privacy
•    Freedom of Association
•    Individual Sexuality
•    Freedom to Trade
•    Freedom to Educate
•    Freedom to Hire


The second column reads:

Read Atlas Shrugged!

Illegitimate, Tyrannical Government:
•    Present Government
•    70% of Spending is Unconstitutional
•    Violates Individual Rights
•    Doesn’t Protect Rights Equally
•    ObamaCare Steals Your Body
•    Many Stimulus Plans Steal Your Income
•    Financial Controls Violate Freedoms of Trade, Contract, Hire
•    Coming CO2 Emissions Penalties are Pointless
•    Redistribution of Income is Immoral
•    Hates Enterprise & Self-Responsibility

Because there is a 60% chance of rain and it is raining now at 0430 hours, the sign is wrapped in thin clear plastic sheet.  It should hold up.  I hope many freedom-loving Americans will show up in a few hours, despite the rain!

Earthquake Damage and Deaths in Haiti and Chile

The recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile caused massive damage in both locations, but the scale of the catastrophe in Haiti was much greater than that in Chile.  The Haiti earthquake was of magnitude 7.0 and between 217,000 and 230,000 people died.  In Chile, the earthquake was a magnitude of 8.8, or about 500 times more powerful than the quake in Haiti.  About 500 people died, largely due to a tsunami.  Many news stories noted that the quality of construction in Haiti is very low, while that in Chile is much better.  The poverty of the Haitians is usually the simple reason given for the low quality of construction.  Sometimes, it was noted that part of the reason for their poverty is due to a lack of freedom and a government that is highly corrupt and grasping.

For some time, I have been reading Thomas Sowell's book Applied Economics, Thinking Beyond Stage One.  It is not a hard read, it is just that I scatter books all around the many places I might find myself when I have a moment to read.  This book was in one of those many places.  Generally, I am concurrently reading about 12 to 15 books, many of them only a page or four at a time before I am back in motion.  This book was copyrighted in 2004, so he does not address the Haitian earthquake of 2010.  But, he does address one of the reasons why Haiti is so grindingly poor.  The last chapter of the book discusses The Economic Development of Nations.  Sowell notes:

Another of the functions of government that affects economic development is its role in providing property rights -- or failing to provide property rights.  Many Third World countries suffer from the fact that, while property rights may exist, they are not realistically available to vast numbers of people.  In some of these countries, a majority of the economic activity takes place "off the books" in the underground economy.  For example, most of the housing in Egypt and Peru has been built illegally, whether because of numerous restrictions and red tape that impede building housing legally, or because of costly legal processes which poor people are unable to afford.  In Egypt, where 4.7 million homes have been built illegally, legally registering a lot on state-owned desert land requires 77 bureaucratic procedures at 31 agencies -- and these procedures can take five years or more.  In Haiti, it can take 19 years to acquire property rights.  In some countries, bribes are necessary to get officials to expedite legal processes, and often the poor are unable to offer a sufficient bribe.

Now imagine yourself an average Haitian citizen.  No, you cannot do that.  That is impossible.  OK, just do your best to imagine that you are very poor and do not have sufficient means to bribe the Haitian government officials to speed up your quest for property rights for the home or store you want to build.  You also cannot afford to have no home or business for 19 years.  You have to earn a living, however hard in Haiti, and you need a roof over your family's heads.  But, since you have no property rights, no bank is going to give you a mortgage for the building you must build.  Even if you are not too, too poor and you are a rising small businessman, you may not have the money to spare to bribe the officials to get property rights.  If you do not hold the property rights, you cannot afford to sink very much money into building a very sound building.  You would otherwise, but the risk of having the building taken from you after you build it, especially if it is well-built and therefore very desirable, is just too great to put much money into it.  So, everyone builds lousy buildings, which are deathtraps in earthquakes, because you either have insufficient money to build a good building or because you cannot risk it in a building you have no property rights for.

Sowell does discuss how this lack of property rights tends to mire the people of a country lacking property rights in poverty.  This is an important discussion and it is also one made at great length in Hernando de Soto's book The Mystery of Capitalism, Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else.  For the reasons I gave above, it prevents people from building safe buildings also.  It guarantees that a less powerful earthquake in Haiti, with no effective property rights, will kill vast numbers more people than will be killed by a much worse earthquake in Chile, where people have effective property rights.

Natural disasters pick on those who do not and cannot exercise their sovereign individual rights.  Some said Gaia caused the earthquake in Haiti because the earth goddess was angry about the failure of the Copenhagen Meeting to force countries into massive energy use cutbacks.  Danny Glover said the failure at Copenhagen caused the earthquake in Haiti!  But, it would appear that if Gaia was angry about anything, she was angry that the people of Haiti had no effective property rights!

Socialism - My Definition

Recently, a commenter was upset with the way I used the word "socialist" in my blog entry Tides Foundation Screed Against Capitalism in Schools.  The individual with no name and identified only by a negation did point out that

Socialism is defined by The Princeton WordNet as:

1. a political theory advocating state ownership of industry
2. an economic system based on state ownership of capital

 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says socialism is

1. A theory or policy of social organization which aims at or advocates the ownership and control of the means of production, capital, land, property, etc., by the community as a whole, and their administration and distribution in the interests of all.

2.  A state of society in which things are held or used in common.

Most Americans reading definition 1. from either to these sources would say, oh, so socialism and communism are the same thing.  I am sure that some or maybe all real Marxists would say, not necessarily.  But let us check out the definition of communism offered by the OED.

1.  A theory which advocates a state of society in which there should be no private ownership, all property being vested in the community and labour organized for the common benefit of all members; the professed principle being that each should work according to his capacity, and receive according to his wants.

This definition for communism is the same as that for socialism, except in the very last part.  Apparently socialism allows for a distribution which may be on a slightly different basis than according to everyone's wants, since it is to be in the interests of all.  Rather subtle difference and actually very academic, since by these definitions, both socialism and communism are impossible!

It is frankly impossible for a community to find any way to distribute production, capital, land, property, etc. in the interests of all.  It has never happened and never will, so socialism does not, has never, and never will exist.  Similarly with communism, no society has ever or ever will be able to distribute enough goods and property to satisfy everyone's wants.  That would be the end of economics.  It would require infinite resources and infinite free pools of labor and genius.

So, Not a Socialist is hardly a surprise.  There is no such thing, unless we allow for those who dream for the impossible, which in the real world we must do.  People are often subject to control by their irrational dreams, or even the irrational Dreams of My Father, in the case of one well-known socialist of our time.

Indeed, many people think they are socialists.  In addition to the Marxists and before Marx, the founders of New Harmony, Indiana, there have been many who have been socialists.  Mussolini and Hitler thought they were socialists, yet they did not advocate the end of all property.  Instead, they sometimes stole property, but more often they used government regulations and just plain commands to force private property owners to do as they were told.  They believed in control of the economy and the means of production, but not necessarily in the need to bother themselves with all the pains of actually owning property.  Besides, people would work harder for you if you allowed them the pretense that they had some control over their property.  But Hitler and Mussolini did claim to be running societies organized for the purpose of distributing goods and services to the people for their best interests.  They actually did redistribute the wealth with such popular aspects of socialism as government-run health care systems.

During and after WWII, it became an embarrassment to many socialists in the West that these fascists had been considered socialists.  It became very important to then try to define socialism in such a manner that the fascists were excluded.  As the Marxists and other varieties of socialists took over most universities, the dictionaries fell more and more into line with this effort to define the fascists out of socialism.  Despite this, in more recent years, many have come to be embarrassed to be called socialists, since almost everyone now understands the terrible evils of socialism in the USSR, China, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, and elsewhere.  Now, these same people and those they have taught are more likely to be environmentalists or social democrats, or some other new fad.  Strangely enough, the policies these people favor are those of fascism.  It is not practical to have community ownership of all property and Americans do not like the idea of that anyway.  So, those who seek major redistribution of the wealth leave most property in the hands of the prior owners, but saddle them with extensive regulations and controls.

A much more practical and useful concept of socialism would be:  A theory or policy of social organization which aims at or advocates the ownership or the extensive control of the means of production, capital, land, property, etc., by the government, and their administration and distribution in extensive measure as is favored by the government of the community.

Under this definition of socialism, everyone does not have to share the same toothbrush or at least put them all in one pot and pick one out with one's eyes blindfolded.  Socialism is a broader concept which some people might strive for and achieve.  It is not a desirable state of affairs at all in my opinion, but the concept has some usefulness in describing what people actually might do and can do.  By this definition, Obama, Pelosi, Mao, Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Mussolini, and Hitler are all socialists.

Like it or not.

The Unpredictable, Undependable Sotomayor

Tim Phillips and Phil Kerpen of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation have written a great review of Sonia Sotomayer's judicial record with respect to decisions affecting businesses and property rights. They called it Sotomayor's unpredictability is bad news for struggling economy. Sotomayor has embraced unpredictability in the law in theory. Phillips and Kerpen say:

The most disturbing statement of Sotomayor's judicial philosophy comes from her 1996 article in the Suffolk University Law Review. In it she defended this statement from legal theorist Jerome Frank: "Law must be more or less impermanent, experimental, and not nicely calculable."

Any businessman will tell you that there is more than enough unpredictability to deal with in the economy without having an overlay of legal uncertainty. Our free-market system depends, in fact, on the stability and calculability of the rule of law.

The basic rules of the road should be as stable and predictable as possible. And during a time of wildly unpredictable swings in economic policy from Congress and the administration, the last thing we need is an experimentally-inclined judiciary.

The need for predictability and to calculate risks and benefits into the future are critical for all aspects of managing one's life. There is no exception to this in business or in investing. I have made this point many times. Phillips and Kerpen then go on and provide a discussion of a number of her specific decisions, which is very enlightening. It is clear that Sonia Sotomayor is a very inappropriate pick for the Supreme Court. But, there is a reason for her being picked, aside from trying to win the Hispanic vote. She will do great damage to hardworking and achievement oriented Americans. Obama and crew truly hate such people.

Erasing the Remnant of Constitutional Government

Obama has chosen Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for the position opening on the Supreme Court upon Justice Souter's retirement. She has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit for 10 years. Justice Souter was no champion of individual rights and was notable in his defense of the City of New London in taking the land out from under Susan Kelo's home. Sonia Sotomayor looks at this point to be a still more consistent enemy of the individual and of property rights. She is, however, full of empathy for those Obama cares about, or at least likes to pose as caring about. She is also an enemy of the successful and those hard-working people who may be on their way to becoming successful.

Obama mostly has his way with the Congress. Congress is capable of making the occasional symbolic assertion of independence when Obama wants them to do something hugely unpopular with Americans, but really no more than they know he will tolerate. In any case, neither the President nor the Congress have been concerned about the Constitutionality of the laws they enact and ratify for a long while. Such little protection as Americans have comes in those rare cases when Americans overwhelmingly recognize an act of Congress as both unconstitutional and unpopular with them or it comes from the Supreme Court serving as an infrequent brake on the erosion of our liberties. Congress and the President have become consistent treats to Constitutional government, while the Supreme Court has been a very inconsistent protector of the Constitution.

Obama, as much as FDR, wants to change the Supreme Court to make its road bumps to his barreling socialist diesel truck as minuscule as possible. His favored group identity agenda, his taking control of the energy industry and all those other industries that use energy, his pending takeover of the medical insurance business, his transfer of business assets to the unions at the expense of investors and the future of the businesses so robbed, his enthusiasm for the massive transfer of wealth from the private sector to the public sector, his desire for unchecked unilateral power in the hands of the President, and his desire to encourage and require Americans to serve government in myriad unpaid or underpaid ways, all appear well-served by his appointment of Judge Sotomayor.

She has made it clear that she thinks a Latino woman makes better decisions than white men. Well, I am sure that some Latino women make better decisions than some white men. But, it is no less offensive a statement to say what she has said than it would be to say that white men make better decisions than Latino women. And frankly, the latter statement might be more defensible on average than the former, since white men may be a bit more rational on average than are Latino women. When hiring someone for a job, averages are irrelevant, however. It is the ability and the character of the individual that count. When it comes to picking judges, we should surely look very closely at the individual and pick that individual who will prove the best defender, protector, and preserver of the Constitution and of those laws which are constitutional. It may be a good thing to have a female Latino Supreme Court Justice, provided she is a true champion of the Constitution and the individual rights it was intended to protect. Of course, in the context of our times, I will be delighted with anyone of any race or gender or national background who is such a champion of the rights to the individual.

Among Judge Sotomayor's poor judgments was her unargued dismissal of the Ricci vs. DeStefano case in which the City of New Haven denied firefighters a promotion though they passed the test which was to decide on their promotion. The city simply decided that there were too few minority members who passed the test, despite its having been carefully designed to discriminate against no minority or at least those minorities approved by government currently. Sotomayor was one of three judges on the review panel and apparently had no empathy for the 20 firefighters who passed the test, including the one recognized minority member who passed it. Empathy is always selective for those of the left. It selectively ignores the capable and favors the incompetent and the unprepared. It bestows itself upon those who meet certain group identity parameters and discriminates against those who do not. It substitutes approved group identities for individual character and ability. It is as simply bad as the discrimination in favor of white males once was in the Antebellum South. The logic is slightly different, however, since the Antebellum South favored white males because they thought they had more ability and better character, while now the left favors those groups they believe have less ability and less good character and consequently can only enjoy material success with the helping hand of the politicians and the force of government.

Judge Sotomayor also was on the panel that issued the Summary Order in Didden v. Village of Port Chester. Richard Epstein, a defender of property rights, has written about this case in Forbes. Judge Sotomayor sat on the review panel that upheld the decision against Bart Didden and his partner Domenick Bologna. Richard Epstein says,

The case involved about as naked an abuse of government power as could be imagined. Bart Didden came up with an idea to build a pharmacy on land he owned in a redevelopment district in Port Chester over which the town of Port Chester had given Greg Wasser control. Wasser told Didden that he would approve the project only if Didden paid him $800,000 or gave him a partnership interest. The “or else” was that the land would be promptly condemned by the village, and Wasser would put up a pharmacy himself. Just that came to pass. But the Second Circuit panel on which Sotomayor sat did not raise an eyebrow. Its entire analysis reads as follows: “We agree with the district court that [Wasser's] voluntary attempt to resolve appellants’ demands was neither an unconstitutional exaction in the form of extortion nor an equal protection violation.”

Apparently, property rights have no standing with Judge Sotomayer. Not only is she opposed then to those who do not meet with her approval in terms of their group identity, but she is also opposed to those who own property. This is not an example of rational empathy and it surely is not an example of the rule of law, most especially not of Constitutional law.

Economic Freedom Ratings - U.S. Out of the Medals

The 2008 report on Economic Freedom of the World, 2006 by James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and Joshua Hall, with contributions by Seth Norton is periodically published by the Fraser Institute and provides an evaluation of the economic freedom of 141 countries around the world in the latest report. In this latest report, the United States of America has continued to lose ground relative to the top performing nations of the world, though it is tied for 8th place with Australia. The U.S. summary score is 8.04 out of 10, while Canada edged it out for 7th place with a score of 8.05. Chile beat Canada with a score of 8.06, but was in turn beaten by the United Kingdom with a score of 8.07. It can be argued that these scores are all essentially equal, but the scores of Hong Kong at 8.94, Singapore at 8.57, New Zealand at 8.28, and Switzerland at 8.20 are significantly better than that of the United States. Ireland finished in 10th place.

Since we Americans think of ourselves as the Land of the Free, as self-sufficient, and independent, this is a very deplorable state we have sunk into. Being surpassed by Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, and Switzerland should shame us mightily. Being essentially tied by the United Kingdom, against whom we rebelled with the claim that we were throwing off the chains of oppression, is ignoble. Being in a near dead heat with Canada and Australia, other longer term colonies of the United Kingdom is rubbing our noses in it. Finally, being edged out by Chile, is near unspeakable. For the Coup de Grace, number 1 Hong Kong is part of China, though administered by very different rules than the rest of China. Why is the United States not number 1?

We certainly have the opportunity to exert a much greater political freedom than that in Hong Kong, Singapore, or Chile to choose to beat those countries out to claim the most economic freedom in the world. Unfortunately, our simple-minded mob-ruled people have chosen to put shackles on their economic freedoms by ignoring the rights of the individual guaranteed by our Constitution. Obama has correctly noted that our Constitution does not allow the redistribution of income and wealth, though he intends to follow such a course with a vengeance.

What does this study of economic freedom in the world measure? First, it believes economic freedom consists of:

• Personal choice
• Voluntary exchange coordinated by markets
• Freedom to enter and compete in markets
• Protection of persons and their property from aggression by others

In light of this, a country receives a high rating if it

• Protects privately owned property
• Even-handedly enforces contracts
• Provides stable money
• Has low taxes
• Does not use barriers to restrain domestic and international trade
• Relies on markets rather than the political process to allocate goods and services
• Allows individuals the right to decide how they will use their time and talents, with the necessary recognition that this means that they do not have the right to the time, talent, and resources of others

The Economic Freedom Index measures economic freedom in five major areas:

1. Size of Government: Expenditures, Taxes, and Enterprises
2. Legal Structure and Security of Property Rights
3. Access to Sound Money
4. Freedom to Trade Internationally
5. Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business

The first ranking was for the year 1980, when the U.S. was ranked 4th. In 1985, we were 5th, in 1990, we were 3rd, and in 1995 we were 4th. Our highwater year was 2000, when we were 2nd with a score of 8.55. By 2004, we were 6th with a score of 8.07. Our score of 8.04 in 2006 leaves us in a tie with Australia in 8th position.

In 1980, the average score was 5.46 and that has risen to 6.65 in 2006. 89 of the 102 nations with scores back to 1980 have improved their scores. Ghana, Uganda, Israel, Peru, Jamaica, Iran, Hungary, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Turkey have the most improved scores. Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Myanmar have the most reduced scores. Nine of the bottom eleven nations are African, with Venezuela and Myanmar being the other two.

Nations in the top quartile in economic freedom have an average per capita GDP of $31,480 in 2006 compared to an average of $3,882 in the bottom quartile. The top quartile nations average per capita economic growth rates of 2.31%, compared to 0.50% for the bottom quartile nations. The average income of the poorest 10% of the population in the highest quartile is $8,730, compared to $961 for the lowest quartile, averaging over the time from 1990 to 2006.

Life expectancy is 79 years in the top quartile, but only 58 years in the bottom quartile. Nations in the top quartile have an average score of 1.68 for political rights on a scale from 1 to 7 with 1 the best. The bottom quartile have a political rights index of 4.39. On a 1 to 7 civil liberties scale, the nations of the top quartile average 1.68, while the bottom quartile averages 4.06. Nations in the top quartile average 84.7 out of 100 for environmental performance, where 100 is perfect. The lowest quartile nations average 63.8 on the environment.

So, what is happening to the U.S. since its highwater rating of 2 in 2000?

• Size of government, degraded from 7.53 to 7.13 in 2006.
• Legal structure and security of property rights, degraded greatly from 9.23 to 7.58!
• Access to sound money, 9.78, which degraded in 2006 to 9.66.
• Freedom to trade internationally, degraded from 8.01 to 7.53.
• Regulation of credit, labor, and business, improved from 8.19 to 8.31.

The U.S. improved only on regulation of credit, labor, and business. Our worst losses were with respect to our legal structure and security of property rights. Loss of freedom to trade internationally and an increase in the size of government also hurt substantially. The recent bailouts will only diminish our economic freedom further. Under the rule of Obama, Polosi, and Reid, we can expect our economic freedoms to continue to degrade.