Connecticut and Other States with Unhappy Residents and Population Loss

Russell Blair wrote an article for the Hartford Courant about the residents' views about living in Connecticut that makes it clear that the high tax and Democrat-controlled state is poorly governed. 

The Connecticut Economic Resource Center surveyed state residents and found that 47% of them said they plan to leave the state within the next five years!  It also revealed that only 44% agreed that Connecticut was a good place to live and raise a family.

A Gallup poll in 2016 had found that 46% of Connecticut residents said they would like to leave the state given the opportunity.  At that time, the state was tied with the high-tax state of New Jersey in that statistic as the state with the most residents desirous of exodus.

The U.S. Census Bureau believes the state lost 1,215 residents in the year following 1 July 2017.  It was one of 9 states with a population loss in that one-year period.  The other population losers were New York, Illinois, West Virginia, Louisiana, Hawaii, Mississippi, Alaska, and Wyoming.  Puerto Rico was another loser.  Note that this period was one of general excellent economic growth in the United States.

A state report from May 2017 says that Connecticut residents have been leaving the state in accelerating numbers since the Great Recession.  A poll in October 2017 noted that the percentage of people with incomes above $150,000 a year considering a move to another state was much higher than the that from the population as a whole.

Connecticut has recovered only 80.8% of the jobs lost in the Great Recession, making it one of a very few states which has not recovered all of the jobs lost.

West Virginia and Wyoming lost many jobs thanks to the anti-coal policies of the Obama administration.  The refusal to allow oil and gas developments on federally owned lands made it impossible for many new jobs in that industry to be developed in Wyoming and Alaska.  The Obama policies suppressing the construction of pipelines hurt both West Virginia and Wyoming as potential oil and gas producers.  Wyoming and Alaska are hurt by excessive federal land ownership.  Anti-mining rulings by the federal government have prevented much mining activity in Alaska.

The status of freedom in the states is another big factor in economic growth of a state and in the general happiness of state residents.  The Cato Institute Ranking of Freedom in the States ranks Connecticut #33, New York #50, Illinois #35, New Jersey #47, West Virginia #34, Louisiana #30, Mississippi #40, Wyoming #38, Alaska #15, and Hawaii #49.  Only the Alaska rating suggests that a lack of freedom in the state and local governments in that state is not a factor in its loss of population.

Another factor that hurts a state in population retention and growth is the quality of K-12 education adjusted for student hetergeneity and expenditures adjusted for the cost of living, which people have not been able to look-up until recently, but they do sense it.  A Cato Institute Policy Analysis of 13 November 2018 by Liebowitz and Kelly has provided such an analysis recently, though it is little known.  In their ranking of the 50 states and DC, Connecticut ranks 38.

Consider the other recent population losers and their rankings in the Cato Institute K-12 education analysis:  New York ranks 46, Illinois ranks 40, West Virginia is 51, Louisiana is 47, Hawaii is 11, Mississippi is 25, Alaska is 48, and Wyoming is 37.  An expensive and poor job of educating children in a state will have a strong job suppression effect and make a state a poor place for a family to raise children.  Of the states losing population, only Hawaii is doing a good job of educating children. Mississippi is very average, but it has a bad reputation as a result of irrational ratings with widespread use such as the U.S. News & World Report rating.  When a state does a poor and inefficient job of educating children, it is likely to do a poor and inefficient job of all other aspects of governance.

The lesson for Connecticut and the other population losers is that poor governance has a very significant effect on people in pursuit of their happiness.  High taxes, poor education for children, excessive and abusive business regulation, the general state of freedom, and high rates of violence and theft are very effective in creating an unhappy populace.

Why is American Independence Day Exceptionally Worthy of Celebration?

We are often told that we celebrate the 4th of July because American troops have fought to keep us free.  Or, it is simply claimed that the USA is the greatest country on Earth.  Some even say America is exceptional, but too often stumble over an explanation as to why that is so or was so.  Some say it is because America is a democracy.  None of these explanations is worthy of those Americans who have understood or who do now understand the real basis for American Exceptionalism.

American Exceptionalism is founded on the fact that the United States of America was to have a government that recognized that:

• All individuals are equal before the law.
• Each individual has the right to life, liberty, property, self-ownership, and the pursuit of happiness and these rights are broad.
• Government is not the source of these individual rights.
• Legitimate government exists to protect these individual rights.
• Legitimate government has a very limited scope and no powers but such as are enumerated in the people's mandate for government, the Constitution. 

Together, these requirements and aims of government constitute the American Principle.

Today, only a minority of Americans believe in the American Principle.  Because of this, the United States of America has definitely lost much of its Exceptionalism.  The Index of Economic Freedom of the Heritage Foundation says the USA is the 12th freest nation, rather high in the group of mostly free nations, but falling once again compared to earlier rankings. The Simon Fraser Institute and Cato Institute do an evaluation of economic freedom around the world also.  Their 2013 report on the degree of freedom in 2011 places the USA in the number 17 position and falling from its earlier rankings.  So, yes the USA is the world's most powerful country.  It is a comparatively free country.  But it is not the world's freest country.

Frankly, the USA is not living up to the American Principle.  It is the American Principle that would make us the freest country in the world.  It is this principle that provides the basis for the great opportunities for personal happiness that we have often provided better than other countries in the past.  On Independence Day we should all be renewing our commitment to the American Principle and we should be paying respect to those Americans who were committed to it in the past and to those who are committed to it today.  We should all be eager to see America once again the premier country in the world with respect to our most important political value, our Liberty as individuals.

Our Mind-Closing Universities and Conformity

A short post by William Murchison entitled When Higher Ed Shuts the Door on Taxpayer's Right to Know discusses the increasing trend to secrecy on the part of university boards and presidential selection committees.  Murchison says:

The Columbia Journalism Review scores the “increasingly closed-door culture” of university boards, such as Kent State University’s, which not only conducted a secret presidential search recently but “admitted to shredding documents to cover their tracks.”  How about the boards of Wayne State University and the University of Michigan, which not only kept their searches secret but suppressed the names of the finalists until both were hired. Then they told the world!

One can see that given the state of commitment to Progressive Elitism and to political correctness on college campuses that it must be very nearly impossible to conduct the managerial affairs of a public college in the open.  If the board and selection committees maintain political correctness and promote Progressive Elitism as they are expected to by student activists and most faculty members, many taxpayers will be appalled to see what is going on.  If the board and other college controlling committees do not do as expected by student activists and faculty, they are also in very hot water.  Nay, boiling water surrounded by drooling cannibals on most campuses.  Given the culture of the college campus today, such public institutions of Progressive Elitist indoctrination are in a dilemma in all but the most socialistic of states.

Private universities generally only need to satisfy their alumni, students, and faculty, despite raking in huge sums of research grants from the taxpayers.  This is a less tough nut to crack, especially in the Ivy League and equivalent schools, where the alumni have long been very successfully indoctrinated in the Progressive Elitist viewpoint.  These Ivy League schools are very assured that virtually all of their graduates are fully committed to Progressive Elitism, partly because they select for that in their admissions and partly because the on-campus commitment to this indoctrination has long been so thorough.

So how did I escape becoming a Progressive Elitist at Brown University?  By never tiring of pitched debates with up to a dozen Progressive Elitists at a time.  By never being intimated, because I was able to shake the very foundations of their belief, at least for a few hours.  After which they would return as though the discussion never occurred, but with no better ideas than those ideas that had failed so miserably but hours earlier.  Progressive Elitism is definitely a religion for almost all such persons and they refuse to allow that religion to be evaluated and assessed by reason.  But being fully committed to reason, I at least was not susceptible to their religious conformity.

Just as most people in many communities become captured by their desire to belong to a particular dominant religion, whether Christian, Hindi, Islam, or Buddhism, so too do most people in a community dominated by the Progressive Elitist religion just have to be Progressive Elitists so they will belong.  So while people are complex and highly differentiated individuals, most still have a great desire to conform so they will be accepted into a community of people.  If this means denying reality, including their own natures, well then reality will generally be denied.  The human suffering that results knows few bounds, which is why our culture has become more and more cheerless and more and more nihilistic.

Only a community committed to reality, reason, productivity, and individuality can achieve man's greatest needs of security, freely given and valued friendships, real cooperation in mutual endeavors and relationships, the freedom to pursue our highly differentiated values generally according to our individual natures, and hence the freedom to pursue our own happiness.  Such a community is rich in its choices and possibilities.

Unfortunately, those people with already low self-esteem are fearful of that very richness of choices and possibilities.  The less free a society becomes, the larger the number of people with such low self-esteem and the more fearful the society becomes of individuality, choices, and possibilities.  Universities, far from opening young people's eyes to the joy of pursuing life in such a rich, reality-driven society, have long been indoctrinating them to choose a conforming, low-choice, hierarchically managed society that denies them their very individuality.

Allow Same-Sex Marriages as a Basic Individual Right

For centuries, most people of the Judeo-Christian tradition have believed that God frowns upon people of the same sex having sexual relationships.  Indeed, for centuries they often thought God demanded that they execute, often very gruesomely, men thought to be having sex with men.  This vision of morality has been transformed for the better, but translated into governments only recognizing opposite sex marriages.  In recent times, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, and then Massachusetts came to recognize same-sex marriages.  Today in the United States, the District of Columbia, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont recognize same-sex marriages.  In addition, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin offer either civil unions or domestic partnerships to same-sex couples.  Forty-one states forbid same-sex marriages, including North Carolina which just passed a ban by referendum earlier this year.

The referendum ban of same-sex marriage in California was challenged in federal court and was declared unconstitutional.  This ruling is under appeal and is still working its way through the federal court system.  Washington passed a law authorizing same-sex marriage and Gov. Chris Gregoire signed it earlier this year.  The Maryland legislature also authorized same-sex marriage this year and Gov. Martin O'Malley has signed it into law.  But, referendums to ban same-sex marriage in Washington and Maryland will be on the ballot in November.  Maine, which presently bans same-sex marriages, has a referendum on the November ballot to allow them.  Minnesota, which presently bans same-sex marriage by statute, has a referendum on the November ballot to additionally forbid same-sex marriage in their state constitution.

How does one rationally analyze the role of governments with respect to marriage and with respect to same-sex marriages in particular?  We have to decide what marriage really is and why government has necessary and legitimate functions with respect to marriage.  In the oldest Judeo tradition, marriage was commonly not a domestic partnership between one man and one woman.  Each husband might have several wives.  This was surely not marriage of the nature of those recognized by government in America today.  Early Christians commonly did not marry, since many thought the end of the world was rapidly approaching with the return of Christ.  After that brief period, Christian marriage was often a means of cementing favorable relationships between families, clans, tribes, aristocrats, and even nations.  A young woman was pretty much the property of her father and the father eventually traded her to a man for a degree of allegiance and goodwill in many cases.  She was now her husband's property.  Marriage was not the spiritual union of two people in the way many think it is today.  It was a commercial and political act in many cases.  The church supported this viewpoint of marriage by providing a patina of spirituality, though spiritual connections between the husband and wife were very commonly missing.

Even today, the role of government is not to provide a spiritual content to marriage or even to assess whether such a spiritual basis for a marriage exists.  An honest evaluation of marriage as provided by government license and contract is that every marriage is a domestic partnership and any spiritual meaning to the union is provided by the married partners independent of government.  The domestic partnership that governments offer is a legal contract with legal implications for shared property, procreation and the raising of children, taxes, mandated time off work to care for one another, and permissions to make medical decisions for one another if one partner is unable to make such decisions.

The only case of such issues in which the sex of the partners may make any difference at all is with respect to procreation and the raising of children.  In the modern world, adoptions may easily take the place of procreation, but many married partners also have no children and there is no title of aristocracy demanding an heir.  Should children be adopted in the relatively rare case by two partners of the same sex, there is little reason for one having to be a high-earning man, since many women are now high-earners.  The domestic partnerships that are formed by government marriage licenses are just as appropriate today for partners of the same sex as they are for partners of opposite sexes.

Each and every American adult competent to care for himself has a very broad sovereign right to life, liberty, property, the ownership of his own body, mind, and labor, and the pursuit of his own happiness.  Legitimate government cannot violate that broad range of fundamental individual rights.  There must be a strong presumption against laws that limit the exercise of personal actions which do not do harm to others.  Legitimate government does not interfere with the association of one adult with other consenting adults, unless substantial harm is thereby done to others.  Legitimate and individual rights-protecting government is highly limited and minimal government.  If it acts to place limits on the relationships and associations of individuals, it must have a very substantial reason for such limits and a strong case for the harm those associations or relationships would do to others.  The only way such harm to others occurs is if the partnership uses force to harm others, but there is no new issue here since initiated harm done by force by any individual to others is already prohibited.  There is no more reason to prescribe the number and sex of domestic partners than there is to do so for a business partnership.  Indeed, a domestic partnership is very much like a business partnership in all respects relevant to the role of government.

Not only is there no reason to place a prohibition on same-sex domestic partnerships, but because our individual rights are equal, we cannot limit marriage contracts to only those who desire a single partner of the opposite sex.  While anyone may exercise their own freedom of conscience in the belief that same-sex domestic partnerships are immoral, abhorred by God, or simply biologically uninteresting to them, government and the People whose individual equal rights are to be protected by government cannot make such judgments in the political realm without violating the freedom of conscience of others with a differing viewpoint.  They cannot legitimately use force to prevent others from exercising control over their own bodies and minds, from evaluating and choosing whose most intimate company they desire, and from pursuing their most personal and individual happiness.

Individual human beings are complex and highly differentiated.  We are all different in the way our minds observe reality, analyze and evaluate it, and assess our own relationship to it and to others.  Our biochemistries differ, our senses operate at many different levels, our nervous systems feel differently, our bodies take very different forms, and we respond very differently to other individuals.  Among the most complex and highly differentiated aspects of an individual's nature is his or her sexuality.  We cannot be serious about the individual right to pursue happiness if we have government place obstacles and unequal treatment in the way of individuals whose sexuality is different than that endorsed by a religion or just recent and local tradition.

It is a basic violation of individual rights for government to discriminate against individuals based on their sexuality.  Legitimate government ought to provide same-sex marriage contracts which are equivalent to those it provides to couples of the opposite sex.  It should even provide a more enlarged concept of domestic partnership contracts as broad in terms of the combination of adult individuals bound in the contract as is the case in small business partnerships.  Government commonly interferes with our freedom of association in far too many ways.  It is time that it stop interfering with that broad freedom of association in our domestic partnerships which it is the right of each and every adult individual to claim.

Understanding this, one should vote for Question 6 in Maryland to allow same-sex couples to marry in Maryland.

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!

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Enforce

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips, who earlier decided that the military's policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell with respect to people in the military having or being inclined to same-sex sex was unconstitutional, earlier this week ordered the military to stop enforcing that policy.  I discussed her decision on its constitutionality here and expressed my agreement with her decision.  She had given the government time to respond to her decision with a plan to end the policy, which it failed to do.   The Democrats did try to pass legislation in Congress to strike the policy, but despite their overwhelming majority, they could not pass the legislation.  The Republicans, to their shame, largely opposed the legislation, as did numerous Democrats.  So, Judge Phillips has acted to halt enforcement of the policy that Obama and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have said they wanted ended.  Nonetheless, the Justice Department has decided to appeal the decision.

This is one of those Go Figure moments.  The Democrats have long claimed they were the champions of homosexuals, but have not ended this policy in the last nearly two years despite having the Congress and the presidency locked up.  Laws discriminating against same-sex relationships and sexual acts are mostly popular with the People yet, though the discriminatory attitude is very much tied to the older generations.  Mostly religious conservatives favor discrimination.  Because of that, the Republican Party is mostly on-board for such discriminatory acts.  This is one of its grievous faults.  Faced with a disastrous election in a few weeks, many Democrats did not have the nerve to defend the equal rights of homosexuals and bisexuals to their lives, liberty, and pursuit of their happiness.  Judge Phillips gave the Democrats an out, which they should have taken.

It is claimed that when a U.S. District Judge rules a law unconstitutional, the Justice Department must appeal the case, which is what it is doing.  This is nonsense.  The President is sworn to preserve, defend, and protect the Constitution of the United States, which of course the members of Congress are also.  The Justice Department reports to the President and he should have ordered them not to appeal the ruling of Judge Phillips because he is suppose to recognize the excellent argument she made as a correct interpretation of the constitutionality of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.  Perhaps, in the now well-established tradition of the Democrat Party, he has not bothered to read her decision.  If he did, he is failing us with his judgment of her argument.  If he did not, he is failing us with his turpitude.  He should be taking his duty to the Constitution more seriously.  Of course, from many things he has said and done, we know that he does not care to actually follow the Constitution since he sees it as being in opposition to many of his socialist policies.  For instance, he faults it for being a roadblock to redistributive policies.

Each of the three branches of the federal government has the obligation to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.  This is not a task given only to one branch.  When any of the three branches fails to exercise its independent judgment, the exercise of our individual rights is harmed.  When Congress considers legislation, it is obliged to consider whether it is constitutional.  If any Congressman thinks it is not, he is obligated to vote against it.  In fact, if he is not sure that it is constitutional, he is obliged to vote against it.  If the President is presented with a proposed law passed by Congress, he is obliged to decide whether it is constitutional or not.  If it is not, he is obliged to veto it.  Because it is the nature of government to try to expand its powers, it should be the practice to recognize that if any of the three branches of government believe a law is unconstitutional, we should be disposed to refusing to allow the force of government to be used to enforce that law.  The bias of the People should be toward limited government and a maximization of the rights of the individual.  If the federal courts rule a law limiting individual freedom of choice unconstitutional, then we have recognized in recent times that the law cannot be enforced.  Unfortunately, we seem to have lost the idea that the Congress and the President are also supposed to be bulwarks against the encroachment of government against our equal, sovereign individual rights as well.  A three-legged foundation is much more stable than a one-legged foundation.

On a related issue, the Justice Department is also wrongheadedly appealing two decisions of a federal judge in Massachusetts that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act federal law is unconstitutional.  The judge ruled that the states, not the federal government, have the power to define marriage.  He also ruled the federal law violated citizens due process rights.  I have never seen any power given to Congress by the Constitution which would allow it to decide who has a valid marriage contract and who does not. 

In actual fact, I believe it very unwise to allow any government to define marriage.  Marriage is a spiritual union of people and there is no way to preserve fundamental freedoms of conscience and the right to pursue happiness if governments are allowed the power to define what constitutes such a spiritual bond.  What they do have within their purview is the job of enforcing domestic partnership contracts, which is done at the state and local government levels, not the federal level.  My views on this are given here, here, here, and here.  Domestic partnerships should no more define and limit the number and sex of partners than does a small business contract.  A single heterosexual couple, gay men, lesbians, bisexual people, multiple heterosexual couples, and polyamorous people should all be allowed the protections and benefits of domestic partnerships suitable to their needs and as agreed upon as free adults.

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.

The Strange Anti-Individualist Mentality

There are heroes who walk among men. These men are those who want to and are capable of managing their own lives. They have the desire and the ability to think independently and rationally and the courage to choose their own values and to act to achieve them. They are optimistic enough to expect that they can realize happiness on this earth. These heroes feel worthy of happiness.

Then, there are the ever-popular anti-heroes. These are the people who want someone else to take on the responsibility of providing them with rules for living their lives. They want to know that if they follow the rules, others will be forced to provide their basic necessities for living to them. They are more interested in everyone having as little as everyone else than they are in lifting the average quality of life in society. These are the people who dread having to think for themselves. They dread having to choose their own values and having to figure out how to achieve those values in their own lives. These anti-heroes do not feel worthy of their own happiness. When they do feel a moment of happiness, they feel guilty for having had that moment of happiness. Generally, they are not very happy people, since it is impossible to be happy and to feel guilty about being happy. These people are then very reasonably not inclined to expect happiness on earth and they are therefore generally pessimists.

There have always been men who were willing to provide the rules and the authority to direct the lives of the many anti-heroes. When life was very tough and primitive, that very fact probably convinced a larger fraction of mankind that they were incapable of taking charge of their own lives and this led to a great demand for leadership who would substitute rules for the lacking effort of many to manage their own lives. The rules were always a combination of those of religion and those of the leaders who led people in wars and who provided police powers within a geographical region. This system of substituting rules for personal self-direction led to thousands of years of painfully slow development for civilizations and squelched the personal initiative that allowed the self-directed man to make technological and artistic innovations. Rulers, whether tribal leaders or kings, were seldom willing to encourage the independent thinker, since such thinkers rarely took all of the rulers rules seriously. It was also easier to rule if change occurred as slowly as possible. Stability was sought, not the dynamic upheavals which come with new innovations.

The development of a larger merchant and professional class of men occurred over time. These men were doers and problem solvers, who the kings and other leaders of Europe came to need in order to live luxuriously themselves, to fight their wars well with the slowly developing technology, and to finance their palaces and their wars. Of course, the nobility disdained such men, but they found them essential nonetheless, so long as they were tightly controlled. It was among these men that the philosophical developments of the Age of Enlightenment came to recognize more and more that each man had the capability to think for himself, if he chose to do so. They recognized that each man had the right to his own person, to the direction of his life, and to pursue happiness and the creation of wealth. The many religious wars of Europe also helped to convince them that man should be allowed freedom of conscience and should not be forced to conform to a particular religion or belief.

But, these men were still largely Europeans with a long tradition in rule-following. It was the Americans who in the United States made the greatest innovations in government by making a republican form of government designed to preserve, protect, and defend the right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The government consistent with this purpose was a very limited government which left men on their own to manage their own lives. This limited government allowed men for the first time to really enjoy freedom of conscience and the freedoms necessary to develop ideas and then to create the organizations and wealth privately to put their ideas to work. For the first time, men were secure in their freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the freedom of assembly with others to share and develop ideas. With adequate avenues for information, the creative thought and energies of Americans became a phenomena for the ages. More and more men were heroes. It was seen by many that man was capable of living his own life and able to achieve his happiness. Many men felt worthy of the happiness they did achieve.

But, the pessimists, the followers, the anti-heroes of self-doubt and self-loathing remained among men, even among Americans. For some reason, wherever men are more crowded together, they seem to turn more sour and lose that knowledge that man must act individually to control the environment in which he lives. The Northeast, the Pacific coast, and the major cities of the Midwest, all turned more and more to socialism. The day of the king leader was gone, but the day of the socialist Messiah has come. Socialism with its myriad rules and its vacuous promises that everyone else will provide for each of us, so that none of us is burdened with managing his own life, has taken the place of the king as rule-maker and authority.

The socialist is an individual who longs to submerse his individuality into a group. As an individual he does not feel worthy. His personal identity has never been discovered and has certainly never been developed. This is the person who worries terribly about how he appears to others, because he has no strong anchor in his own personal assessment of himself. He always feels unworthy of happiness and guilty for any shred of happiness he has achieved. If only he could belong to some group and give up his happiness to that group or another, he could escape his feelings of unworthiness and guilt. If only some group or combination of groups would tell him what to do and then tell him he has done the right thing. If only he could lose his individuality!

So, the socialist, like many of those of religious belief and like many of the impoverished followers of kings, is an anti-individualist. He is a man who fundamentally feels incapable of living his own life and unworthy of any success he may actually have in living it. Unfortunately, for these people, the great lesson of the 20th Century was that socialism comes with serious problems. Because it squelches the individual with his own thoughts, his own values and goals, and his own initiative to action, the creation of wealth stagnates and then the wealth of mankind shrivels. The people become more and more impoverished and dispirited. They turn to drink and any other available distraction from the bleakness of their lives, both spiritually and materialistically.

In socialism they sought an equality of material goods, but in the process they always lose the even more important spiritual values which in a free market induce them to produce those material goods and generally to seek out paths to happiness by investing in their own knowledge and in sharing values voluntarily with others. The involuntary sharing of the socialist system, deprives the sharing of values of all of its value. Socialist systems always become totally focused upon material goods in a way no free market system can ever be. In the free market system, personal values and goals are the motivator for thought and action. The system allows for a great diversity of values, with all men able to live harmoniously, provided only that they agree not to initiate the use of force. In the socialist system these values and goals simply make one a renegade and they must be squelched with the brutal use of force. This is indeed what happened time after time in the 20th Century when all sorts of variants on socialist systems were tried. Among these were fascism, it Nazi variant, and several forms of communism.

Since socialism was widely seen to have failed, many of the anti-individualists came more clearly to realize that they are anti-man. They loathe themselves, so of course, they loathe mankind. Now those who loathe mankind can turn to a man-hating god, or at least to a god that thinks men are sheep. They can also turn the earth or nature into a god. If they do the latter, they come to think of man as an adulterer of nature and the earth. Man is the defiler of the natural beauty and some intrinsic good represented by the earth and nature. This is a very effective outlet for the self-loathing. It is also a rationale for chaining those men who seek to create wealth and to make mankind more comfortable and secure by controlling nature and by altering the environment for the pleasure of man. The anti-individualist resents the individualist mightily. He hates to be reminded that some men are capable of living their own lives and that some men seek out, choose, and develop their own values.

The popular perception that socialism had failed at the end of the 20th Century caused the unworthy feeling man to seek out environmentalism and catastrophic man-made global warming alarmism as substitutes. These served his purposes very well. Then, along came a Messianic socialist leader of the old school who had added environmentalism and catastrophic anthropogenic global warming to his repertoire and many a socialist who has taken refuge in anti-man environmentalism, is now also returning to his socialist roots. Among other discredited theories, Keynesianism has made a comeback. Labor union bullying, the nationalization of the healthcare industry, mandate-chained energy industries, heavy-handed controls of the evil banking industry, further entrenchment of the communist government school system, and much more of the old-time socialist agenda is back in a big way. This is the best of times for the determinedly anti-individualist anti-hero.

Except for one little problem. It must be awful to feel incapable of managing your own life. It must be terrible to feel unworthy of happiness. It must be the ultimate boredom not to be able to think for yourself. How I pity these socialists, rabid environmentalists, and man-hating anthropogenic catastrophic global warming alarmists. They suffer such a lack of spiritual values.

Chapman -- Pursue (and seize) happiness

Steve Chapman's commentary in the 7 July 2008 Washington Times by that title is about a global survey that shows that people are happier in countries with a greater measure of freedom and money. He notes that "There is no such thing as a rich totalitarian country, as even the onetime totalitarians in Beijing finally realized. So in a very real sense, freedom is the key to happiness." The survey was conducted by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. People in 97 countries were asked just two questions:

• "Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, rather happy, not very happy, or not at all happy?"
• "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?"

Of the 97 countries, the poll has been previously taken in 52 countries for the last couple of decades. The percentage of people giving upbeat answers rose in 40 of these 52 countries. As China and India have grown freer, their peoples have become happier. This was also the trend in the advanced world, with the exceptions of Great Britain, Germany, Austria, and Belgium. The people of the United States, France, Canada, Denmark, and Japan became happier.

Chapman notes that only America was founded on a right that sounds rather eccentric even today: the right to the pursuit of happiness. But this perception of the writers of the Declaration of Independence has served as a very good model for countries who want their people to be happy.

The Right to Life and Slavery

Most Americans believe that as human beings one has the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today, I want to revisit a single aspect of our individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

There are many ways to look at one's life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. There are other ways to look at it which are also right than the viewpoint I am going to take today. But, fundamentally our life consists of all the hours we have lived and our plans for the use of our future hours. Let us oversimplify this further to consider each hour that we have just lived and each hour that we are about to live and make decisions on what we are going to do with it. If an individual had no control over how he just used his last hour, then it is unlikely that that hour added much to his life, it surely did not add to his sense of living in liberty, and he is unlikely to have been very successful in the pursuit of his happiness. Similarly, looking forward to the next hour of our life, we have a decision or several decisions on how to use it. If we can chose to spend all of that hour doing things that we believe will enhance our life, then we are already assured that our life will be better, we will feel free, and we will be pursuing our individual happiness in those ways which uniquely define that happiness to us as an individual, living creature.

So, what shall I choose to do in the next hour? Well, it is Sunday, so I could go home and work on building a new retaining wall for the garden. Let us suppose I do that. I get some fresh air, I get a wee bit of exercise, and I get a nice garden retaining wall. Oh, and my home value goes up a bit and my property taxes go up with it. Of course, I also paid sales taxes already on the wall blocks waiting to be used and on the gasoline used to go buy them. OK, so I guess I will do something else. I could watch TV and listen to the news. How exciting to find out about the latest effects of flooding in Iowa and the new declaration of a federal emergency area to cover the troubles there. And, I learn about how Obama is sure that there is no need to allow the drilling of oil in federal lands, which just happen to cover most of many of our western states. Or, I could hear McCain proclaim that he thinks the north slope in Alaska is pristine and we should leave it that way. I could hear many schemes to make the American medical system like that in Canada, the UK, France, or even Cuba. Yes, even Cuba, but I will not talk about that one, since only the truly insane want Cuba's medical system. So, if I watch TV news, I am frustrated, but, hey, I made the choice, right? But, I did still pay taxes to purchase the TV and I have a room for it in my house on which I must pay property taxes. Still, both choices to work on the garden or to watch TV are relatively lightly taxed and both are relatively free of government expropriating some of my time during that hour or in subsequent hours because I made one of those choices.

Let us suppose that being a small business owner, I decide to go to my laboratory and work on analyzing a carbon coating said to have been applied to a cubic zirconia gemstone to make it look more diamond-like. The income of an hour of work on that project will have federal income taxes, social security taxes, Medicare taxes, Workman's compensation insurance, and Maryland and Federal unemployment taxes withheld from it. I have no determinative choice in how that money is used and I oppose most of the ways in which it is used. Some of the ways it is used are just wasteful and evil for depriving me of the better things I could do with it, but many of them are for the actual doing of further evil deeds. Because I am a business owner, I have further bookkeeping to perform for replacing any supplies I may use in the laboratory analysis I chose to do in this hour. If I take some part of the money I made and invest it in buying additional laboratory equipment, then I get to pay property taxes on that equipment and do the bookkeeping to keep track of its depreciation over the years. Now, I happen to enjoy finding out such things as the nature of new coating technologies and I have specifically in the area of coatings on gemstones discovered some false claims in advertising. I also like working to be able to add to my laboratory's analysis capabilities by buying new equipment. This is fun, but is there any valid reason why when I make this choice to do productive work, I am taxed many more minutes of the hour with tax payments and with the mandated, unpaid contribution of future time than I would be if I worked on the garden retaining wall or I watched TV?

I think it is fair to say that this is clearly wrong. This is clearly a violation of my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I do not have the liberty to choose to spend the next hour of my life on anything without government taking a part of that hour away from me. This is especially true if I try to do productive work which requires an income to enable me to carry out that work. It costs a lot of money to keep a laboratory working. Most of the income the laboratory makes goes into paying the bills to keep it going. A small part, highly dependent upon the fluctuations in the laboratory income, goes to me in the form of a salary or into buying equipment which enables the laboratory to make more money in the future or at least to keep it up-to-date enough to continue making as much money as it does now. But, each new piece of equipment brings more taxes and more bookkeeping. I may love doing the scientific investigating that I do into the properties of materials and in evaluating the success or failure of various manufacturing processes, but I am forced by governments to pay a heavy price in precious minutes out of every hour that I choose to put into such work. Why? Why do I have less right to an hour of my life put into laboratory material analysis than I do if I put it into building a garden retaining wall or into watching TV?

What gives those who vote for these government policies that discriminate against what I like to do the right to make such forceful demands upon the minutes of each hour of my life? Is it not the case that each such minute they take is one in which they hold me as their slave? For years I have been asking this question. No one ever gives me an answer. Those elitists who believe they know how a man should live his life and that they are the ones to force him to do so according to their values never answer my question. Why should they? They have the power. The force and as-needed violent power of government is in their hands. I am deprived of many minutes of every hour I choose to work by applying my time, my investment of untold thousands of hours in all the technical and scientific knowledge I have acquired, and my investment in the laboratory I have struggled to build and I do not even get an answer as to why.

It is especially wry that many of these socialist elitists controlling governments claim to be egalitarians. This is a fraud. We all have the same number of hours of life in a week, yet they take many more hours in the form of taxes and mandated requirements for our work from some of us than from others. This taking is the taking of the hours of lives. They seek equality of income and property, but the most precious thing that any of us have is the hours of our lives. That, these socialists tax with extreme inequality.

Walter E. Williams wrote a column called "Are Americans Truly Against Slavery" in which he identified excessive taxes as slavery. As I have noted in the past, Williams is very good at getting to the heart of the matter and he does so with an obvious passion. I wrote a comment in reply to this column also at this same website. A number of the other comments are also quite good.

Do You Beat Your Neighbor?

In America today we have a great many citizens who either believe the government should enforce Christian Bible morality or that the leaders of the Nanny State should see to it that the helpless masses are taken care of. These people are now being joined by some who say that American law must be determined by Sharia Law, which is the only true law, the law of Allah. All of these people believe that they are good and kind-hearted people who care greatly about their fellow man, while those who believe in Constitutionally limited government, individual rights, and laissez faire capitalism are monsters who do not give a fig for their fellow man.

I have had this charge leveled against me since I was a teenager. The equation is simple: If you think you know how your neighbor should live his life and you think you can make his life choices better than he can, then you try to gain a democratic majority and impose your way to live his life upon him. If you try to do this, whether you succeed or not, you are a very virtuous person who cares about his neighbor, his fellow man. Those who resist you are bad guys. The resisters are bad whether they think that they want simply to manage their own lives or because they think that most other people are better qualified to manage their own lives than the resister is or than the government life management service is.

Of course there are some people who wish that others would manage their lives for them. There are not very many, but there are many elitists who think that there are many people who need to have them provide life-management services to the needy and unable. As I have often observed, it is a funny thing to consult with those whom the elite think are the dependent ones. Most of them think that they themselves are not dependent, but that there are others who are. Talk to the others who are and you find the story repeating itself in most cases. Strangely, most people would rather run their own lives, but they think that there are many more people who want help via a one-size fits all government mechanism than there actually are. But believing this and wanting to care about their fellow man, they push for laws to provide government programs to compel people to contribute their time and income to the needy recipients of the law.

The needy have a very special status. They are to be treated well and provided for. This is the means by which those who favor the laws to help them become virtuous. Meanwhile, the fact that the law requires that individuals give up their rights to their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness does not make the law proponent feel like a bad person. The fact that the law requires that if any particular individual does not provide the tax money to be used or does not provide the service free or at below market cost, then government force will be used to see that he does, does not make the law proponent feel bad. Government employees will be dispatched to seize the resisters property or to garnish his wages. If the recalcitrant individual is so foolish as to try to defend his individual rights, well, shoot him! He obviously did not care about the community enough. He was obviously suffering from a severe mental illness, social Darwinism or is an anti-social sociopath.

Would anyone even think to look into this individual's life to see how charitably he treated people that he knew and cared for? Very unlikely. Almost everyone would simply say he broke the law and he had to be compelled to submit or to be put away. So, our good people who care so much for their fellow man are now fully prepared to kill their fellow man and their neighbor in the interest of The Law, despite the fact that the law was not Constitutional and was not necessary to accomplish the mission it supposedly had. After all, the mission could have been accomplished very well by private charity. Any private charity with the enthusiastic support of a majority of the voters should be able to care for a great many needy people.

So why must the people who wish to help the needy use the force of law to do so? Why do they not put their money and time into what they themselves say they believe in? Doesn't one have to conclude that they do not really believe in helping the needy enough to put much effort into it? Don't we have to deduce that they are eager to gain their virtue on the cheap? But, it is a virtue that threatens any individual who believes that he has an individual right to choose his charitable acts himself with death. How do these people who claim they are virtuous for caring about their fellow man square this with hiring government law enforcers and sending them off to kill the individualists among them. Why do they want to beat their neighbor? Why are they so violent? Yet they pretend to be good and to care. Is this not transparently false? Are these not clearly evil-doers?

If you want to help the needy, by all means go and do it. Just have the common civility not to force everyone else to commit their lives to your charity. They may not have any charity they wish to commit to. If so, that is their right. On the other hand, they may be very committed to charitable acts which are simply different from those which you have a commitment to. If you really have a commitment to helping others, then put your money and your time where your mouth is. Don't shove a gun down someone else's throat to make them give their money and their lives to your value. They have the right to choose their own values. It is by choosing our own values that we develop and manage our own lives. Without that freedom, there is a clear violation of a man's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of his happiness.