Donald Trump Again Proves He is Not Trustworthy

Donald Trump has stated that it is right for a businessman to do anything to make money that is not illegal.  Such an attitude is the basis for many claims that big government is justified to control unethical big businesses.  He has tried to steal the property of others by using eminent domain for his benefit.  He has long made most of his campaign contributions to Democrats to buy a position as one of their favored special interests.

Within two days of Senator Ted Cruz suspending his campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidential race in 2016, Trump has now

• Stated that he will not follow through on his tax-cut plan.
• Said that he would not oppose an increase in the minimum wage.
• Will seek campaign contributions.
• Appointed a former Goldman Sachs partner, George Soros hireling, and major Hillary Clinton donor to head up his campaign fund. 

Many more betrayals will be forthcoming from this most unethical man.  This is a man who holds the viewpoint that most people are incapable, readily hoodwinked, and like him are ethically challenged.  This is the viewpoint of the convinced Progressive Elitist.  But, Donald Trump is an actor and he has fooled many supporters, proving many people are indeed easily hoodwinked.  The Progressive Elitist and special interest control of the federal government will continue for another four years.

When Americans persist in not understanding the principles of legitimate and limited government, they will be ruled badly and arrogantly by special interests.

Marriage and Party

There is an interesting post at the American Enterprise Institute on the correlation of the percentage of children raised by their biological parents by state and the correlation with Republican or Democrat states.  It has long been clear that college education results in a higher percentage of children being raised by their biological parents and a higher fraction of the population in the Democrat states has a college education.  It has been clear that having Asian ethnic parents provides the highest parental presence, followed by white parents, Hispanic parents, and finally black parents.  This study adjusted for the effects of college education and parental ethnicity to find that there was some residual positive correlation between Republican states and a greater percentage of children being raised by their biological parents.

This graphic was particularly interesting:

The reddest states, or those most consistently Republican, had the highest percentage of married adults.  The question is this:  Are people more likely to be married because they are Republican voters or they more likely to be Republican voters because they are married?  It is most likely more correct to say that whether someone is married or not is a significant factor in how that person votes.

We know that nearly 60% of self-identified Republicans are married and that two-thirds of unmarried women voted for Obama and Democrat Congressional candidates in the 2012 election (see here).  A majority of married women voted for Romney in 2012 (53% to 46% for Obama).  Overall, Romney won 56% of the married voter vote to Obama's 42%.  So, it is clear that a voter's marriage status significantly influences the party for which a person votes.  As a consequence, it is most likely more correct to say that a higher percentage of children are raised by their biological parents in Republican than in Democrat states because a higher percentage of adults are married in Republican states.

One may question this by noting that since the number of people with college educations is higher in the Democrat or Blue states, then the fact that a college education correlates with a greater likelihood of parents raising their children together may offset the difference in marriage rates.  This is where the adjusted data for education and ethnicity comes in.  The yellow bars show that adjusted data and the adjusted marriage percentages for adults are still higher in the Red states than in the Blue states.  It appears that marriage is more valued in the Republican states than it is in the Democrat states, consistent with the rhetoric of the respective parties.

Marriage can most certainly be of great value to those in a marriage.  It is a partnership that is much more loving and intimate than any other, with huge advantages in security and living efficiency as well.  Some Republicans claim that this makes traditional marriage the cornerstone of society.  In my evaluation, while traditional marriages are clearly extremely important, there is plenty of room for non-traditional marriage concepts to offer many of the same advantages to people who do not satisfy the limitations of the traditional marriage concept.  The advantages of marriage are a right which should be available for everyone to claim with willing adult partners.  This freedom will then make our society even stronger and better for the highly differentiated individuals of which it consists.

Republicans, who often claim they favor more individual freedom, should embrace an enlarged concept of marriage to be consistent with both equal individual rights and their acknowledgement of the many values gained with marriage.  Those values should not be limited to heterosexual couples.  Everyone has a very broad freedom of association which they may exercise in their private sector choices, whether in a business context or in the context of a domestic partnership.

Income Inequality and Government Policy

The very strongly socialist Democrat Party has made what it calls the problem of income inequality the cornerstone of their party platform.  It is the justification for calls for raising the minimum wage once again.  It justifies further and endless entitlement programs.

But is income inequality any more of a problem than are the inequality of the following characteristics of an individual?

• Intelligence
• Morality
• Energy
• Friendliness
• Athleticism
• Goal-Directedness
• Height
• Attractiveness
• Benevolence
• Sexual Prowess
• Humor
• Knowledge
• Loyalty
• Productivity
• Interest in movies and TV
• Interest in partying and drugs
• Interest in politics
• Interest in reading
• Interest in spending time with children

No.  A desire to reduce income inequality by the application of government force is very much similar to the desire to reduce the inequality of any of these other individual traits by the use of government force.  In all cases, the use of force for such a purpose is an attack upon individuality itself.  It is most certainly an attack on the freedom of the individual to make his own choices and to own and manage his own life.

Some people choose to work 30 hours a week and watch 40 hours of TV a week, while others choose to work 70 hours a week and watch little TV.  Perhaps instead of transferring the extra money earned by the 70-hour worker to the 30-hour worker, we should tax people for the income they did not earn while watching TV?  That is only fair, especially considering that the harder worker generally did more to improve the standard of living of his fellow Americans.

Yet it is also the case that we Americans are actually far richer than most other people in the world.  Consequently, if income inequality really were a problem that should be leveled by government, then it would have to be performed by ceding American governmental sovereignty to the United Nations.  Even poor Americans are too rich by world standards and should be deprived of much of their income to equalize the human condition with respect to income.  Look at the percentage of people in the world with higher incomes than the following incomes:

$1,400               48.1%
$20,000               3.6%
$25,000               2.0%
$32,400               1.0%
$35,000               0.81%
$51,939               0.28%, this is the median US household income in 2013, US Census Bureau
$75,000               0.11%
$100,000             0.08%
$125,000             0.07%

Only 0.28% of households in the world have incomes greater than the median household income in the USA.  So, let those who are serious about eliminating income inequality by a simple re-distribution of income give away almost all of their own income until that equality is achieved around the world.  As the income of the lower half, less than about $1400 a year is increased, the dividing line between the poorer half will rise and those Americans earning only $1400 a year will start to receive redistributed money.  But, those earning the outrageous sum of $20,000 a year will always be contributors in the self-sacrificial duty to raise the income of the poorer half of the world population.

Well, alright now, but many Americans are only thinking of income inequality as a problem within the confines of American, because its great usefulness as a political power tool is in the context of the Democrat Socialist and generally the Progressive Elitist effort to transform the USA.  Why would these people think of income inequality as a problem to be dealt with as a matter of principle.  No, it is just a convenient tool to increase the power of government and of those who wield great influence over the government.  The aim is not to achieve income equality even in the USA.  It is to pretend to redistribute some money in the name of reducing income inequality so the government can be made more powerful.  A more powerful government can do even more to make those who have pull in Washington still richer than the present special interest control over Big Governments makes these cronies of Big Government.  A real effort to eliminate income inequality would defeat the real purpose, just as offering a real education in government-run schools defeats the real purpose of having government and special interest control of the schools.

A very interesting study of income inequality was produced from U.S. Census Bureau data from 2012 which shows the Gini index of income inequality by congressional district in the US.  Those districts with Democrat representation are shown in blue, while those with Republican representation are shown in red.  The plot below shows the districts in order of Gini index, where a higher Gini index represents a greater income inequality:

It is immediately striking that congressional districts most dominated by Democrat Representatives are those with the highest income inequality.  At the lowest and highest levels of income inequality the rate of inequality changes the most.  Let us look at these two ends of the spectrum of American income inequality more closely:

Democrats represent 23 of the 25 most income unequal congressional districts, while Republicans represent 13 of the 25 districts with the least income inequality.  Republicans are predominant in those districts with more nearly normal distributions of income.  Now, we cannot immediately assume that Republican representation reduces income inequality.  But, we should at least be asking whether there are reasons why Democrat representation might be adding to income inequality.  The rational man wants to know.

We should attack this question with some knowledge of where Democrats hold representation in the House of Representatives.  The results of the 2012 election are shown in the map below:

The Democrats dominated the big cities of the Northeast and the Pacific coast, some highly Hispanic and Native American areas of the Southwest, the union strongholds in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Missouri, a few concentrations of black voters in the Southeastern states, and a complete dominance of New England.

I am pretty sure the highly Hispanic and the highly black concentrated districts are responsible for many of the least income inequality districts the Democrats hold.  These districts are often uniformly poor, which is not a good thing.  It would be wonderfully good if these districts had more higher income people, to state the obvious.  Any district would benefit from more higher income people, provided that income was obtained in the private sector.

But most Democrat districts tend to be the high density population districts of cities and their nearby metropolitan areas.  Good fences and low population densities make good neighbors, but these conditions are lacking in cities.  As a result, there is a tendency for city dwellers to want more control over their neighbors.  They cannot achieve this on their own, so they enlist government with its monopoly on force to perform this function.  They therefore vote heavily for Democrats.  There are few exceptions to this rule.

High population densities also lend themselves to making great fortunes.  The best CPA in Russell, Kansas will only have a very few well-off clients, while a CPA with no better ability in New York City might well have many wealthy clients.  A very good restaurant in Stilwell, Oklahoma, the Strawberry Capital of the World, with a population of 3,840 people, will make less money than will a restaurant of the same quality in many parts of Chicago or its suburbs.  The networking possibilities of a major metropolitan area and its financial institution advantages will lend themselves to extreme wealth creation for a least some people.  So, we cannot blame Democrats across the board for these advantages that contribute to income inequality, except where that networking is used to provide a greater than average influence to special interests over governments.  This is a big exception, because we know that this kind of pull is used to increase the fortunes of a few cronies at the expense of the many who have little or no such pull.

Among those who have no pull are those who live in the inner city and sometimes suburb school districts with notoriously bad decades-long Democrat control of the government-run schools.  These schools are run as holding pens for children, for the advantage of government employees who staff them and the labor unions that represent school employees, as indoctrination centers for the mythical wonders of Big Government, and very often for the advantage of cronies who provide excessively expensive services and goods to the school systems.

The child victims too commonly do not graduate from high school.  Those who do often read at the third grade level, cannot write a coherent sentence, and know nothing about history, economics, science, and math.  Wonder of wonders, these city school children commonly have little ability to earn decent incomes as adults.  Very high percentages cannot finds jobs.  Many turn to crime and/or become dependent on drugs and/or welfare programs.  All of these income depressing effects are aided and abetted by the Democrat-controlled governments.

The problems do not end here.  The cities are more likely to have severe licensing laws for professions and jobs, which greatly limit entry into these jobs.  Those who start poor are more likely to be kept from becoming more wealthy by these restrictions.  Cities also produce a plethora of regulations, which hit small businesses especially hard.  This makes it harder for a poor person to succeed by creating his own small business.  Democrat city governments commonly favor labor unions, whose members add to their income by depressing the income of larger numbers of non-union members.  Once again, the Big Government model adds to income inequality, this time by suppressing the income of the poor.

Yes, Democrats might be more concerned that income inequality is common in America because it is more common in their districts.  So, they make more of it.  But, their governmental principles, insofar as they have any, embrace many policies that make income inequality greater.  They increase the income of those favored by the government, who are commonly not those they imply are favored in their speeches aimed at the poor and minorities to gain their votes.  They depress the future and present incomes of the poor and the minorities they claim to champion.  The governments they control are not righting wrongs of the private sector.  They are not righting wrongs of the government sector. 

This will not change no matter how often they pose as champions of income equality, because the wrongs their Big Government model does are inevitable by the nature of Big Government's need to sustain itself.  In comparison, competition and individual choice are very effective in limiting any injustices created in the private sector.  In the Big Government model, the government sector is characterized by force and a disrespect for the individual.  That lack of respect for the individual reduces the probability of individuals increasing their wealth all across the spectrum of incomes, but seems to act as a more severe depressant of the incomes of the poor who have no real pull in Big Governments.

24 States Expand Medicaid Under ObamaCare

The CBO predicts that 9 million more people will go on Medicaid in the next year.  Most of this increase will be in the 26 states that expanded Medicaid under ObamaCare.  These states are shown in gold in the map below:

The states not expanding Medicaid coverage under ObamaCare have the number of additional people they would cover with coverage to 133% of the poverty level shown on them.  This represents a huge future savings for these states after 2022 for their state budgets when the federal government stops paying 90% of the bill for the added state dependents.  Those living in the states in gold had best have piles of gold to pay the tax bills after 2022 for all of the people on Medicaid.

The CBO is predicting that ObamaCare expansion of Medicaid will add 9 million people on Medicaid by the end of 2014 and 13 million by the end of 2020.  These additions and the future large increases in state budget costs will occur in the states in the above map in gold.  Of course, Progressive Elitists will complain that the added 5 million people who might have been added in the blue-gray states have been sadly neglected in this redistribution of wealth.  In fact, they like to complain that even more of those in poverty live in many of these blue-gray states.  See the map below from one of their websites:

So the states not expanding Medicaid have an average 9.1% of their populations qualifying as below 133% of the poverty level, while the national average is 8.0% of the population.  But one thing that is overlooked is that there is one single poverty level for the 48 contiguous states and higher levels for Alaska and Hawaii.  So, this map of those below 133% of the poverty level has to be compared to one for the cost of living.  Clearly, some people at 133% of the poverty level are much better off in low cost of living areas than are others at that level in high cost of living areas.  The cost of living map:

Now we see that the states that refused to raise their Medicaid dependency levels to 133% of the poverty level are mostly states with most of their population below or at the national average in the cost of living.  Most of the states that raised the Medicaid eligibility level to 133% have most of their populations living in high or average cost of living areas.  Of the 24 states not raising the Medicaid eligibility level to 133%, Wyoming, Montana, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Maine are the only ones mostly at the average or higher in cost of living.

There is a reason that Republican-dominated states tend to have lower than average costs of living.  The governments in those states mostly extract less from the private sector to use in unproductive ways in the government-sector.  Their present choice not to increase the eligibility for Medicaid in their states is a move to continue having a lower cost of living.  That means that people in those states above 133% of the poverty level will continue to be better off than will people in the expensive government states that mostly raised their Medicaid eligibility levels under ObamaCare.

After 2022, when those mostly above average cost of living states have to pick up the cost of the 13 million people added to Medicaid, their cost of living will shoot up even higher.  Their taxes will increase further and some of them will go bankrupt.  More and more people will migrate out of those states and move to the states that did not raise their Medicaid eligibility levels.  There will be a further easily seen lesson on the perils of redistribution and socialism.  Socialist transformation and change will have seriously damaged the middle class who will have to pay the bills in the mostly Democrat states that made this bad choice to expand Medicaid.

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

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

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

1) I own my own body and mind.

2) God owns my body and mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Electoral College Result Prediction on Presidential Election

I believe the most likely outcome of the Presidential election will be:

Of the generally recognized swing states, the only one that I believe is foolish enough to vote for Obama is Nevada.  Nevada showed its perfidy by voting for Senator Harry Reid, who has refused to allow the Senate to obey the law and produce a budget ever since Obama occupied the White House.  Harry Reid is wily, but a very wrongheaded man.  The state that could send him over and over to the Senate has the good judgment of a Las Vegas labor union.  In other words, Nevada is too much like California now, with which state it shares both an astronomical unemployment rate and home foreclosure rate.  Sometimes, no oftentimes, the people of a given area suffer mass delusions.  I know, I live in the Baltimore - Washington corridor, where mass delusion reigns supreme.  I do think there is about a 40% chance that Nevada will vote for the much superior candidate, Romney.

There is about a 20% likelihood that one of the three states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota will vote for Romney.  I believe Romney will win the election with a differential in the percentage total vote of between 2 and 4%.  If I am wrong, I think a win by 5% is more likely than one by 1%.  A win by 5% will mean that Romney will likely carry at least two of the states Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota.  Both Pennsylvania and Michigan will be very hard hit by Obama's plans to shut down the coal-fired electric power plants and both will be hurt by his plans to discourage hydraulic fracturing to release shale oil and gas.

Most of the polls are underestimating the turnout of Republicans and those Independents who have had more than enough of Obama.  They are overestimating the turnout of Democrats.  This is even true of Rasmussen polls, which are among the best of the polls.  The fact that Romney has a normal Republican lead with men and Obama has much less than the normal Democrat lead with women figures very big in my understanding of how this election will turn out.  Another key factor is the fact that Independents are decidedly favoring Romney over Obama.  There will also be substantially more crossover Democrats voting for Romney than Republicans voting for Obama in this election.  These factors have to generally push all of the swing states, most of which are now mostly Republican at the state level, into the Romney column.  The work of the Tea Party Americans in ensuring this is also underestimated.  The Evangelicals have also become aroused.

Obama is left only with substantial majorities among young people, blacks, and Hispanic Americans.  Each of these groups has suffered just unbelievably high unemployment.  Falling incomes and rising prices, such as energy prices, have hit blacks and Hispanic Americans especially hard.  The fraction of young Americans who favor Obama is high, but usually these young Americans do not vote in large numbers.  We will see that many fewer of them will vote in this election than in 2008 and of those who vote, a very substantially larger fraction will vote Republican.  The turnout of black and Hispanic Americans will also be lower.  The decrease in the fraction who vote for Obama this time as compared to 2008 will be much smaller than that among the young, though it will be greater for Hispanics than blacks.

Now that Americans have had so much time to get to know Obama and to be angered so many times by his lies and deceptions, I am very disappointed that we are still in a situation in which nearly half of all Americans will vote for this con man and failed President.  How anyone could want four years of constant attacks on our individual rights and the resulting economic stagnation, is very much beyond my understanding.  Romney should have easily surpassed Obama with well over 300 electoral votes.  It appears more likely that there are too many very foolish Americans for that to happen.  At this point, it looks to me that Romney will get 295 electoral votes.

I will be heartened if Romney comes very close in Minnesota, my birth state, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, however.  Coupling that with wins in Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio and the continued shift of the Midwest into the Republican column may be a good sign of things to come.  We have already seen these states send more Republicans to their state houses and to the House of Representatives.  They have been electing Republican governors as well.  The private sector unions have been losing power as they have lost membership.  More and more Mid-westerners are learning that if they are to have well-paying jobs, it is good that the governments not be anti-business.  As Mid-westerners show more respect for economic freedoms, they will align more with the more reality-interested Republican Party than with the socialist Democratic Party.  This re-alignment may take a couple more election cycles to be complete, but it sure is important to America's future freedom and prosperity.

Creating a Republican Senate

As a libertarian, albeit one often in disagreement with the defense policy of the Libertarian Party, I am well aware that the best check on the growth of the federal government has been to have a Republican President and a Congress with one house in the control of each party.  In the upcoming election, the House of Representatives will remain solidly Republican.  My prediction that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will replace Obama and Biden because the American people would finally get over the celebrity status of Obama and see him and Biden as the empty socialist suits they are is finally clearly happening.  In ordinary times, it might be best that the Democrats retain a narrow control of the Senate, but this is not an ordinary time.

It is absolutely essential that ObamaCare, really the ObamaUncaringTax, be repealed.  It is also very important to repeal the Dodd-Frank Too-Big-to-Fail Crony Mercantilism Act.  It is essential to reform and control the EPA and finally kill the myth of catastrophic man-made global warming.  We must free business to develop our huge oil and gas deposits and to make use of our rich supply of coal.  We must end the waste of taxpayer dollars fed into uneconomic green energy companies with no viable markets and the electricity mandates for green energy that are driving up our electric bills and making our electricity supply unreliable.  We also need to push back the government employee unions, the abuses of the Obama National Labor Relations Board (NRLB), and try to provide national Right to Work legislation.  We need the opportunity to replace one or more of the five Supreme Court Justices who so falsely read the Constitution that they could vote to uphold ObamaCare.  To accomplish this critical mission, we have to have a Republican Senate for the next two years.

According to the present Rasmussen Reports on the state of the Senate contests in the November 2012 election, the situation is:

Held by Republicans, not up for re-election, 37
Safe Republicans, up for election, 6
Leaning Republican, 4
Toss-ups, 5
Leaning Democrat, 6
Safe Democrat, 12
Held by Democrats, not up for re-election, 30

If all of the safe and leaning Senate races go as Rasmussen predicts, then the Republicans will have 47 seats and the Democrats will have 48 seats in the Senate.  Consequently, the Republicans have to win 3 of the 5 toss-up seats for there to be a 50-50 split of the Senate, with tie votes to be decided by Paul Ryan.  Of course, it would be much better for the Republicans to win at least four of the five toss-up races.  These toss-up races are:

Massachusetts, Scott Brown (R) v. Elizabeth Warren (D)

Montana, Denny Rehberg (R) v. Jon Tester (D)

Ohio, Josh Mandel (R) v. Sherrod Brown (D)

Virginia, George Allen (R) v. Tim Kaine (D)

Wisconsin, Tommy Thompson (R) v. Tammy Baldwin (D)

Scott Brown (R) and Elizabeth Warren (D) have generally been running a very close race for the Massachusetts Senate seat for a long time.  She is an ultra-socialist who likes to say to small business owners that they did not create and build their businesses, the government and maybe the community did.  She is mad to redistribute as much income as she can.  Of course, she is determined to keep Americans from developing the new riches in oil and gas deposits that fracking has opened up.  She is also aligned with Obama in determination to kill the coal industry.  If she wins, she will be developed as a likely 2016 presidential candidate.  So, though Scott Brown is a moderate Republican who is often a friend of big government, she is a much greater danger as a friend of huge government.  This is an election contest which the Republicans can win.  Please support Scott Brown with a strategic contribution.

The Montana Senate seat race has incumbent Jon Tester (D) against Denny Rehberg (R), with the momentum in Rehberg's favor.  Rehberg is a rancher and small businessman who has long served as Montana's soul member of the House of Representatives.  In the 2011 Club for Growth Ratings of the financial responsibility of House members, Rehberg's rating was a rather low one for Republicans at 58%.  However, almost no Democrats scored more than 20% and not one came close to getting a 58% rating.  In the Club for Growth Senate Ratings, Jon Tester had a 17% score.  Denny Rehberg would be a decided upgrade and he is needed badly to repeal ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and to reset the EPA and the NRLB.  A donation to his campaign would be a wise and strategic investment in America.

The Ohio Senate race features Josh Mandel (R)  running against incumbent Sherrod Brown (D), who is commonly called the most socialist Senator, now that Obama is no longer the most socialist Senator.  Supporting Josh Mandel has the effect of also adding to ads and get out the vote efforts that will help push Romney over the top in this critical swing state.  Josh is all about good government.  Please read his bio, which is a hard-nosed description of what he has done as Treasurer of the state of Ohio and when he was in the Ohio House.  This is not a fluff politician.  He won his election as Treasurer as the biggest vote-getter in the state, winning 80 of 88 counties in Ohio.  Standard and Poor rated his $4 billion government investment fund with its highest rating.  His General Obligation bond fund has Fitch's highest rating.  He expanded the Ohio liquidity portfolio by $2.3 billion since he took office.  Josh is pro-free enterprise and a strong supporter of the Constitution.  He has the strongest possible endorsement from the Club for Growth.  Josh Mandel will be a super good Senator.  In comparison, Sherrod Brown had a 2011 Senate Club for Growth rating of 0%.  Donating to the campaign of Josh Mandel is a super strategic investment in good government!

In Virginia, George Allen (R) is pitted against Tim Kaine (D), a former spend-thrift governor who left the finances of the state of Virginia in disarray.  Virginia is a swing state, so supporting Allen will tend to also support Romney.  George Allen is not the strongest Republican candidate, but the election is starting to swing in his direction.  The people of the state of Virginia are beginning to wake up to the sad state of the Obama economy, though their very highly populated northern Virginia Washington suburbs have benefited greatly from the mindless federal government spending under Obama.  They are beginning to also learn that the Defense sequestration of budgeted funds to run DoD and the armed forces looming to take effect in January is going to shatter defense contractors and leave DoD employees without pay for about two months.  Government spending reductions by all other government agencies are being spread out over a period of time to minimize the impact of the upcoming spending reductions, but DoD has been told by Obama that it has to continue spending its allocations of funding at the originally specified rate and take all of the hit in January on the sequestration.  In other words, DoD is to take a nose-dive over the cliff onto the rocks below at Obama's command.  Since deployed armed forces cannot be stood down, this means that incredibly drastic cuts in money going out to contractors and to civilian DoD employees has to occur.  This will shatter the economies of Northern Virginia, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, and Hampton Roads.  In addition, Obama has ordered the defense contractors, who are required by law to notify employees 60 days prior to termination, to ignore the law.  The termination notices are due the week before the election.  The government has promised to pay the fines that the companies will be subjected to for ignoring the law.  This is completely lawless behavior by Obama to help his re-election chances.  Tim Kaine is very supportive of Obama in this dastardly and destructive plan.  George Allen, for all his limitations, will be much the better Senator and he is critically needed to repeal ObamaCare and the other accumulated mischief of the Democrats over the four years from 2007 through 2010 when they controlled both houses of Congress.  Again, please make a strategic donation to George Allen.

The Wisconsin Senate race features Tommy Thompson (R) against Tammy Baldwin (D).  Tommy Thompson was a former Wisconsin governor and cut income and property taxes and eliminated the inheritance tax.  Tammy Baldwin is a Madison liberal who serves in the House of Representatives.  Her Club for Growth rating in 2011 was a miserable 9%.  Giving Tammy Baldwin one of the contested Senate seats would be an unmitigated disaster.  Making a donation to Tommy Thompson is another strategic investment toward turning the ship of state enough to avoid an imminent crash upon the socialist rocks.

Despite my materials analysis laboratory small business being in the fourth year of greatly reduced company earnings due to the never-ending Great Socialist Recession, I have just made donations to each of the Republican Senate candidates above in these toss-up races.  I hope that the recent rise in the polls of Romney and the rise of a number of these Republican candidates in their states, will result in the combination of Senate control with a Republican President needed to undo most of the damage done by a Democrat Congress for four years, followed by a Democrat Senate with four years of a Democrat President.  May the healing begin.

Making Sense of the Rasmussen Presidential Tracking Poll

According to a three-day average over 3 - 5 October, the daily Rasmussen Presidential Poll reports that Romney was leading by 49% to 47%.  However, Rasmussen also says that Romney has the vote of 89% of Republicans and Obama has the vote of 88% of Democrats, while Romney is up 16% on Obama among those not affiliated with the Republican or Democrat Parties.  The report I have seen does not say how many Republicans are planning to vote for Obama or how many Democrats plan to vote for Romney.  The report also does not say what percentage of Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated voters were sampled.

The Rasmussen party affiliation survey for September is now available.  According to it party affiliation is as follows:

Republicans, 36.8%
Democrats, 34.2%
Other, 29.0%

Democrats have increased by 0.9% since August, Republicans have decreased by 0.6%, and Others have decreased by 0.2%.  I expect the media claims that the Romney campaign was losing and Romney did nothing but make gaffes had pushed down the Republican affiliations and boosted the Democrat affiliation.  Romney's debate performance may reverse that trend in October.

I will assume that 4% of the 29.0% may vote for the micro-parties such as Libertarian, Green, Constitution, and Socialist Workers.  This leaves 25.0% of non-affiliated voters to pick either Romney or Obama and Romney is up by +16, so this implies that 58% will vote for Romney and 42% will vote for Obama.  The last two Washington Post/ABC News polls I adjusted for party affiliation had about 7% of each party voting for the candidate of the other party, so I will assume that here, to the advantage of Obama.  So, how does the adjusted vote turn out then:

Romney:  (0.89)(36.8%) + (0.07)(34.2%) + (0.58)(25.0%) = 49.6%

Obama:   (0.07)(36.8%) + (0.88)(34.2%) + (0.42)(25.0%) = 43.2%

Thus, Romney had a 6.4% advantage in a poll including the day of the debate and the two days after the debate.  How on Earth Rasmussen manages to reduce this to a 2% Romney advantage, I have no idea.

If the pollsters are thinking that Republicans and anti-Obama unaffiliated voters are not going to vote in this election, I think they are out of their minds.  What is more, Rasmussen reported that this poll gave Romney a double-digit advantage with voters over 40 years of age and these voters do turn up at the polls.  Obama on the other hand had a double-digit advantage with voters under 40.  That part of his pool under 25 are represented among the unemployed in large numbers.  Many of them cannot afford the high Obama gasoline costs to fuel their overly expensive clunkers (thanks to the Cash for Clunkers Obama program that made old cars scarce) to get to the polling places.  In general, the younger voters do not vote in the same percentages as older voters, so my adjusted results probably understate the extent of the Romney advantage.

In my lifetime, no presidential candidate has won the electoral vote when behind in the popular vote by more than a few tenths of a percent.  Even before the debate, there was considerable evidence that the polls of the swing states were heavily over-sampling Democrats and the reported leads by Obama in many of those states were fallacious.  An evaluation of polls for the states of Florida, Ohio, and Virginia made before the debate indicated that they were highly misleading and that Romney was really ahead in each of them.  I think Romney is going to win the election despite the best efforts of most of the media to throw the election to Obama.

I am quite disappointed in Scott Rasmussen and his polls.  I thought he usually did a good job polling, but the evidence here is that he is not doing so now.

Adjustment of Washington Post/ABC Poll for Party Affiliation

The Washington Post/ABC News presidential poll published on 1 October 2012 says that Obama leads Romney among likely voters by 49% to 47% and among registered voters by 49% to 44%.  The poll was based on 1002 respondents between 26 and 29 September.  But the respondents broke down as follows:

Democrats 33%
Republicans 28%
Independents 34%
Other 4%
Don't Know 1%

Because only about 9% of the people asked to respond to a poll will do so and because there were 58 questions in this poll, it is very likely that those willing to respond are not necessarily a good representative sample of those who will vote.  For instance, what fraction of small business owners, struggling very hard these last four years to keep their businesses going in the Obama economy, will take the time to answer these questions?  Yet, this group of people is heavily Republican.  In general, one also can imagine that the sample of people willing to take this time on the phone may be more heavily weighted toward the unemployed than the employed.

So, we need to find a source of how many people are Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Others.  Rasmussen Reports has such data here.  They do not have their September numbers up yet, so I will use the August numbers as I did in my prior adjustment of Washington Post/ABC News presidential poll results from 11 September.  The Rasmussen party affiliation numbers are:

Democrats 33.3%
Republicans 37.6%
Other 29.2%, of whom I expect 25.2% are Independents and 4% are Libertarians, Greens, Constitutional Party, Social Workers Party and other micro-parties

We can use the registered voter results of the WaPo/ABC poll to see what percentage of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents will vote for either Obama or Romney and apply the Rasmussen party affiliation weightings to adjust for the proper sampling of voters by party.  According to this poll,

Democrats: 89% for Obama, 7% for Romney
Republicans: 7% for Obama, 87% for Romney
Independents: 47% for Obama, 47% for Romney

With the Rasmussen party weightings among registered voter respondents:

Votes for Obama = (0.89)(33.3%) + (0.07)(37.6%) + (0.47)(25.2%) = 44.1%

Votes for Romney = (0.07)(33.3%) + (0.87)(37.6%) + (0.47)(25.2%) = 46.9%

The Washington Post 49% to 44% advantage to Obama becomes a 47% to 44% advantage for Romney among registered voters.  If we use the WaPo/ABC poll adjustments for likely voters we get:

Votes for Obama = (0.91)(33.3%) + (0.06)(37.6%) + (0.45)(25.2%) = 43.9%

Votes for Romney = (0.07)(33.3%) + (0.90)(37.6%) + (0.49)(25.2%) = 48.5%

The recalculated likely voter advantage for Romney is 4.6% compared to his recalculated registered voter advantage of 2.8%.  The WaPo/ABC advantage of likely voters was given as a 2% Obama advantage by them.

Of course this change in the advantage hinges upon the Republicans having a registration advantage over Democrats. There have been a few people who have checked on this in some of the states that will report how many people are registered as Democrats, Republicans, and Other or Independents.  The general story seems to be that Democrat registrations are way down and registrations as Independents are way up compared to 2008.  Republican registrations are more constant, but generally up a bit.  Here is one such report by John Hinderaker at Powerline on registrations in Ohio.

We should also be aware that there are many more Republican governors, Senators, Representatives, and state legislators now than there were in 2008, so it is very probable that there has been a trend away from Democrat to Republican party affiliation since then.  Even in this election, Real Clear Politics has the Republicans in the House with 226 seats leaning to them, the Democrats with 183 seats leaning to them, and only 26 toss-up seats of which more than half are now Republican.  If the Republicans win in half of the toss-up seats, they will still have a substantial House majority.  Such a majority would be unlikely if the Democrats had the 5% registered voter edge implied by this WaPo/ABC poll with their sample of registered voters.  That cannot be the case.

It should also be noted that this is an unusual poll result in that it implies that among Independent registered voters the split for Obama/Romney is 50-50, or more precisely 47-47.  Almost every other poll has shown Romney to be winning among Independents.  It will be interesting to see if future WaPo/ABC polls continue to show a trend toward equality of Obama and Romney among Independents.  Personally, given the continued dire state of the Obama-mismanaged and abused economy and Obama's failure to provide adequate security in our embassies and consulates as the Mideast sinks into chaos, I expect Romney to improve his advantage among Independents.

The Democrats are claiming that Romney was greatly hurt by his fundraiser comments that he could not expect many of the votes of the 47% not paying income tax and of those highly dependent upon government welfare programs.  No doubt he was hurt, but one of the questions in this WaPo/ABC survey was whether people thought too many people were dependent upon the government and they answered heavily in favor that yes, too many were dependent.  This poll also noted that more people believed the economy would recover with Romney as President, despite the skewed sample.  That has to be a most important Romney advantage.

A Tea Party Once Again in Massachusetts

Scott Brown, a Republican down a month before the 19 January 2010 special election in Massachusetts to a better known State Attorney General, Martha Coakley, has beaten her with a 52% to 47% margin of victory.  Most of the Democrats are either blaming her as a bad candidate or the National Democratic Committee for not supporting her strongly enough.  But Coakley was the perfect caricature of the out-of-touch, uncaring educated elitist socialist.  Given that many of the People have been awakened by the Tea Party movement in their alarm at losing their rights and individual choices to governments grown massive, paternalistic, corrupt, aloof, and uncaring, she confirmed their growing understanding of the Democrat party.

Scott Brown, on the other hand, had a pretty good sense of the changed mood of the People, which had changed far more in Massachusetts than one can easily comprehend, given the almost slavish past history of the people of that state to the Democrat party.  They had massively voted for such dim-wits as Teddy Kennedy and John Kerry many times.  But finally, even the people of Massachusetts have awakened to the fundamental and critical issue of our time.  Will Americans remain individualists with the independence to choose their own values and to manage their own lives or will they simply become numbers in a group identity as Mao wanted to make his people.  Yes, the same Mao admired by some of Chairman Obama's advisers.

Massachusetts already has a very expensive "reformed" health insurance plan.  For a small increase in insurance coverage, all the covered are paying much more in premiums already.  The plan is not proving popular and ObamaCare is even less popular.  At this point, ObamaCare will only raise the costs of health care more in Massachusetts and will not increase the coverage further.  In other words, the bad deal for the rest of the country is a really, really bad deal for the people of Massachusetts.  So, this is a bit of a special case situation for Massachusetts.

Scott Brown campaigned as though he was virtually an independent in a state where most voters are not registered under a party.  There are 3 Democrats for every Republican, but added together these two parties only account for a bit less than half of the voters.  Scott Brown campaigned as a supported of the War on Terror, not as a first responder to man-made disasters.  He most importantly said he would vote against ObamaCare as the 41st vote.  He also said he was committed to tax reductions and a more limited role for government.  He also proved a hard campaigner who was eager to get out and talk to real people.  Perhaps because he did so, he found a way to appeal to real people, many of whom have become Tea Party participants.

Tea Party participants have a renewed understanding that government has become too big and too expensive.  It is interfering with their personal lives too much.  They have a renewed appreciation for the Founders and for the Constitution.  They resent the pointless debts they, their children, and their grandchildren are now saddled with.  They are angry that their representatives will not listen to them, that they do not read the bills they vote for, and they do not care if those bills are constitutional.  They have come to understand that government does not create jobs, they do.  The source of jobs is the private sector and it is Capitalism, not Socialism, that allows everyone the opportunity to improve their lives.  Socialism just picks out special interests to reward with grants of government powers and favors.  Corruption and vicious fights between huge numbers of special interest groups is a necessary result of choosing fascism and Marxism.  The people are becoming aware that that is what communitarianism and progressivism really are.  That is not the change they want.

The Tea Party people are voting for the party out of power.  They are turning to the Republican candidates, at least in Virginia, New Jersey, and now Massachusetts, not because they are happy with the Republican party, which has also pursued big government and too often proven corrupt, but simply as a counterbalance to the very out-of-control Democrats.  The Democrats have proven that they learned nothing from their loss of power for many years after the early Clinton years.  They are as arrogant and power-grubbing as ever.  They are worse than the Republicans in power lust and corruption.  Still, the People want a sense that the Republicans will not once again betray them.  They do not yet have much confidence that they will not.  The future of the Republic depends upon whether the Republicans can at least earn the confidence of the People of a Tea Party mood to regain the greater measure of control of government.  It looks likely they will be tested with it after 2010 or 2012.  They had better prove worthy, or the Tea Party movement may well become a third and a dominant party.

Changes of State Representatives and Electoral Votes in 2012

We are close enough to the 2010 Census time that pretty good predictions should be possible for the states which will gain seats in the House of Representatives and states which will lose seats there.  Since the number of Electoral College votes each state has is the sum of the number of Representatives and Senators they have, this also has possible important implications for the presidential race in 2012.

On 23 December 2009, the Census Bureau made its last U.S. population estimate by state as of 1 July 2009 prior to the census.  If these figures were translated into seats in the House of Representatives, the blog site 270toWin says the apportionment results would be:

Texas +3

Arizona +1

Florida +1, now RED

Georgia +1

Nevada +1, now RED

South Carolina +1

Utah +1

Washington +1

Illinois -1

Iowa -1

Louisiana -1

Massachusetts -1

Michigan -1

New Jersey -1

New York -1

Pennsylvania -1

Ohio -2

The states that voted for Obama in 2008 are in blue and those that voted for McCain are in red.  Meanwhile, the voters in Florida and Nevada have become very unhappy with Obama, so Florida and Nevada are now red.  So, of the now Red States, there is a net gain of projected 2012 Representatives and Electoral Votes of +8.  The loss among the Blue States is -8, for a net swing of 16 Electoral College votes and 16 Representatives to the Republicans.  Of course, this is just a zeroth order estimate with respect to the effect upon the House of Representative's party affiliations.  Redistricting and the quality of candidates will have a major impact on the number of Republican Representatives a state winds up with.  The impact on the re-election chances of Obama is more straightforward.

There is something else to observe here.  People go where they can find jobs.  The Red States are clearly creating many more jobs than are the Blue States.  There is a long-term downside to being the more highly socialist party.  The Party of Mass Destruction, the Socialist Democrat Party, is very effective in destroying the business climate and in destroying jobs.  When jobs are killed, as in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois, people have to move away to states with jobs.

This is just a snapshot of the jobs issue, but if one weights the state unemployment rate of November 2009 by the absolute number of Representatives projected as gains or losses, the average now Red State unemployment rate for those changing number of Representatives is 10.24%.  That for the now Blue States changing representation is 10.92%.  By November of 2009, the huge sums of money sent to Wall Street for the bailout had surely kept employment from falling as much in NY and NJ as it otherwise would have.  A huge amount of bailout money was transferred to the auto industry in MI as well.  Since the stimulus bill was mostly a long-time wish list of Democrat special interest funding, more of it went to Blue States than to Red States.  Nonetheless, the Red States still had a lower weighted November 2009 unemployment rate!

The Government Problem

We have a massive problem with government ignoring the best interests of the people in these United States of America. Both the people and their elected representatives clearly have come to hold each other in disdain. One would think that in a democracy, the people could use the power of their vote to elect representatives who respected them and cared strongly for their welfare, which translates into believing that the principal requirement of the people is their freedom to choose their own values and to be able to act on them to manage their own lives. But, many of the people themselves are elitists who believe that many other people are incapable of choosing their own values and incapable of managing their own lives. Almost all of our politicians arise from this elitist group of the people and they are also of a group that lusts for personal power and influence.

Throughout history, democracies have been short-lived. They always have transitioned into tyranny. They fail because most of the people have their hands full managing their own lives and do not make the effort to understand what is going on in government. Even when some understand what is going on, they rarely take the necessary time to oppose it. Those who lust for power always have more incentive than those who wish to prevent its use. The Framers of the Constitution were fully aware of this lesson of history and they greatly feared democracy. They were confident that the people could manage their own lives, but they understood that the people were not very good managers of government. So, the Framers worked very hard to produce a government whose powers were limited to the minimum needed to protect the rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness from anarchy and from a transition into a tyranny.

They allowed the people to elect the members of the House of Representatives who had the sole power to originate bills to tax the people and had a short term of office of two years. They balanced this democratic arm of the legislature with a Senate, whose members were chosen by the legislatures of the states. This balanced the perceptions of the people with those of a group of people who were more select in abilities and who might be more likely to bear the interests of the states and local regions in mind. Democracy was not absent here, but it was a level removed. The six year term of office of the Senators was also a means to give them a longer range viewpoint of the needs of the people, which would be less subject to the fads and fashion that swept through the people from time to time. The President was not to be chosen by direct vote of the people, but was to be chosen by the Electoral College. The Electors in the Electoral College were in the position very briefly and would not have time to accrue interests contrary to those of the people common to those who hold power for some time. They were also to be selected by a process that included state interests and kept them removed somewhat from the whims and inattention of the people. Of course, they were expected to be intelligent and interested citizens.

Over time, we have removed many of the republican features of our government as designed by the Framers of the Constitution. We have replaced them with democratic features. We have put the government very directly in the hands of the people. Despite this, recent events and a long history have made it clear that the people do not really control the government. This result is just what the Framers of the Constitution understood would happen. For a very long time, polls of the people show that they have very little respect for Congress members. Meanwhile, contrary to the Framers belief that the people could manage their own lives, our democratically elected Congress members believe that they must micromanage the lives of the people, because the people are not capable of managing their own lives. So, we now have a system of government in which the people, who are thought to be incapable of managing their own lives, are given the responsibility to manage government by democratically selecting their rulers, who will really rule them with massive volumes of laws to regulate their every behavior and action.

On the face of it, this inversion of the wisdom of the Framers of the Constitution makes no sense. One simply would never turn over the management of the household to the children. Yet, we have a government that regards the people as children and yet all of whose officials, save the Supreme Court, are selected directly by the people, those very same children. Why would this be desired by the elitists? Because this was the cost of power and as the system evolved, it became very clear that the people were easily manipulated.

What would have prevented this even with the trend toward democracy? The only hope would have been that the people had a strong concept of the need for highly limited government so that the people, who were capable of managing their own lives, would be free to do so. Once upon a time, most Americans did understand this. However, the elitists who hungered for power found the means to prevent this principle from continuing to be strongly held by the people. In the 1800s they worked very hard to build up public school systems designed explicitly for the purpose of controlling the information that would inform our youth about America and its principles. They found that they could use a fear of immigrants and their different cultures and religions as a means to sell this idea of public schools to the American public, but the elitists who ran the school boards, ran the colleges of education, and wrote in the teaching journals, never lost sight of their real goal to use public schools to broadly indoctrinate our youth in the need for stronger and more controlling government. In addition, the public schools are very adamant that our society is full of victims and people who are incapable of managing their own lives. It is biased against industry and employers and belittles their accomplishments. To this day, men such as Weatherman Bill Ayers, are working tirelessly to further the cause of public school discrimination against all things of the private sector and all things pertaining to individual competance and rights.

One of the principal reasons that education is valuable to an individual is precisely because a knowledge of history and a study of government will cause many to understand the need for limited government and for a republican, not a democratic, government. It will also teach youth that they are capable of managing their own lives and to help them find moral principles by which they can manage their lives. Modern public schools are a creature of government and the teachers and curriculum are chosen to further the needs and interests of a power-seeking government, not the needs of the students and the people generally. There is an obvious conflict-of-interest here. Furthermore, public schools must at least pretend to respect religious freedom, so they long since abrogated the moral guidance that would conflict with religious freedoms very overtly. They do offer much moral guidance nonetheless, but it is carefully chosen to support a belief that people are commonly incapable of managing their own lives and need the extensive help of government in doing so.

Of course, the people are not in school anymore for most of their lives, so it is necessary to carefully control the information they get after they have left school. This is done by a very careful control and manipulation of the media. Of course, people who can write and who feel comfortable speaking for hours to the public, are generally elitists educated and indoctrinated in the public schools and universities. Even most of the private colleges and universities are now run by elitist socialists. They ignore the stories of how government power has abused the interests of the people and pretend that all problems are caused by the private sector. They favor the idea that any identifiable problem requires a solution by government, even if it was government that first caused the problem. Since the news is so dominated by stories of government, the reporters need to keep close to government officials to have early access to stories, so this is a further means of control. In addition, big government releases all stories with a spin favorable to big government, which takes in many reporters over time, even if they begin with some skepticism.

Americans are problem-solvers. They like the idea of identifying problems and solving them. This is done all the time in the private sector and it is generally done well, but we seldom hear about these problems being solved. Since we like the idea that we Americans are problem-solvers, it gives most Americans something of a thrill when the government announces that it has identified and solved a problem. We like it when action is taken to solve a problem, so government takes advantage of this and "solves" problems better left to the private sector all the time. The private sector too seldom toots its own horn to tell the public about the many problems it solves and solves well. Besides, the schools and the media are biased only to telling the people about government "solutions."

Back to where this has left us. The elected officials of the federal government have their own agenda, which interestingly enough, most of the people do not approve of. Polls of the people clearly show them to have a very low regard for Congress. Despite this, Congressmen are re-elected over and over. Apparently, the very vast majority of Congressmen are masters of the re-election game. Perhaps most voters are happy with their Congressman and only unhappy with all the other Congressmen. More likely, I think this unhappiness with Congressmen commonly does visit their own representative. But, the alternative choices on the ballot usually offer only slightly different principles of government, the media backs the government activists more often than not, and as the voter thinks about who to vote for his mis-education recall kicks in and he makes the wrong choice. Besides, as often as he is disgruntled by government actions that inconvenience him, he has only the most muddled sense of history and or moral principles, so how is he going to make a rational choice?

Let us examine a couple of specific issues that illustrate some of the problems. Let us start with the ethanol mandate passed more than a year ago. This bill mandated the expanded use of ethanol in gasoline mixtures because it was a means to increase energy independence and to decrease air pollution. Of course, it was also a means to add considerable income for corn farmers. Corn was already a heavily subsidized crop. It also produced income for ethanol refiners such as ADM. Of course, what was most important for our political Congressmen was that they could buy many corn state votes and the rest of the country would not complain too much because of the energy independence and pollution control rationales. About the time of passage, it was a bit inconvenient that a number of studies discovered that ethanol from corn took as much energy to produce as it provided when it was combusted. Also, it was found that it probably increased, rather than decreased, pollution. It also soon became apparent that food prices for grains went up, the value of farmland increased, and those meats produced by feeding livestock corn went up drastically. Rising food prices hurt our large food export market.

Did Congress revoke the bad law mandating the use of ethanol? Of course not. The special interests making more money had to be kept happy and the general public did not much seem to care that they were being bilked. If the states still had any power over the federal government, they might have brought pressure to bear, but the many states with minor corn production no longer have such power to watch over the interests of their citizens in our no longer representative government scheme. We are a democracy now!

How about the Waxman-Markey energy tax being called a cap and trade bill? Its rationale is that it will prevent the pollution of the globe by American CO2 emissions. More Americans now know this rationale makes no sense than those who believe it. This does not matter. The Congress hides morally behind their claim that man-made CO2 emissions are causing catastrophic global warming, even though the globe has been cooling for 11 years despite CO2 emissions increasing and despite the growing scientific evidence that sunspot inactivity is going to result in cooling for several more years. They are buying the votes and campaign contributions of all those many Americans who are opposed to business and industry and of those who are religious-type environmentalists who hate all things in man's best interest. They are also buying the campaign contributions of all the wind generator, solar power, biomass conversion, and electric smart-grid companies.

It bothers them little that they will cause large-scale unemployment in the coal industry, the oil refinery business, the oil pipeline business, for those railroads that haul large amounts of coal, and the coal-fired electric generator plants. They will badly hurt energy-intensive industry, including aluminum, steel, coke, bakery, paper, brewery, oil refinery, trucking, busing, and cab companies. Some industries have been bought off in the short term by free coupons for CO2 emissions, but these will not exist in a few years. Meanwhile many other companies will see their electric bills rise greatly. My $880 per month laboratory energy bill may well double. This is not a trivial expense item for us. This increased cost of energy use will hurt American exports. It is also going to hit all of us at home. Of course, in the early years the pain will be less and it will then be ratchetted up all the while the Earth will continue to cool! But our democratically elected Democrat Congress will not care. A huge phone call volume that overwhelmed the phone system in the House for three days did not prevent the Waxman-Markey bill from passing. To be sure, it was diluted in the early years to make it less of a pill to the coal-using states and plenty of earmarks were added to gain other votes, which changes required that 300 additional pages be added at 3 AM to a bill that was already 932 pages long. The House passed it that same day. No one read the bill before voting for it.

It will be very hard to get this reversed, once it passes the Senate. The Senate might once have been a stronger bastion of state interests and the coal-rich, coal-using states and the oil-refinery rich states might have brought this massively destructive bill to a stop. It is now likely to be a closely run affair, especially now that a selective recounting of votes in Minnesota has put Al Franken in the Senate producing the Democrat Party's 60-vote control against filabuster.

Let us consider the massive bailouts. Most of the people opposed these. The Congress did not listen. Now that companies receiving bailout money are finally being allowed to return it in some cases, the government wants to spend it elsewhere rather than to reduce the debt. The debt burden is huge and now there will have to be general tax increases. There have already been increased taxes on businesses, which will have to pass on the costs to consumers. There will be increased taxes on the sort-of-rich, but much of that will have to be passed on to the customers who made those people rich by buying their services. There will be increased energy taxes, even if Waxman-Markey does not pass the Senate, since they will simply go back to the drawing boards and come up with an energy tax that will pass.

Finally, the people have long thought that there are problems in the health care industry. There are. Most of those problems are caused by the government and some of the complaining people understand this. Some do not. But, most people are happy with their own health insurance plan. Obama said we could keep the plan we were happy with. But now, Congress is talking about taxing many people's company's contributions to their plan. Obama's administration is also saying that they will establish criteria for acceptable health insurance plans. You may not be a candidate for drug addiction, but you will have to have a plan that covers care for such people. This will raise your costs. You may not have any need for menal disability care, but you will have to pay for a plan to cover those who do. So, you may very well not be allowed to keep your present plan. If the company you work for does not offer a plan, in many cases it will have to. To do this, some companies will have to fire some employees. Some will also opt to pay the penalty fee and no longer offer a more expensive government-qualifying health insurance plan. One can only imagine how the government will spend that income. You will wind up buying the government health insurance plan then and it will come to be subsidized, thereby eliminating all private sector health insurance plans. The people are very clear in rejecting a government run health care industry, but this is exactly what Congress wants to force upon us. We are a democracy, but Congress does not listen to us. They do not have to, since they are masters at fooling us into re-electing them.

What is the bottom line? Our republic became a democracy. The people do not have a sufficient grasp of history, of the principles of good government, and they do not follow the shenanigans of our government well enough to actually control it. Our democracy has become exactly what the Framers of the Constitution knew democracies will always become. It has become a tyranny! To correct this situation, we must at least create a strong education competition by private schools with the public schools. In time we should eliminate the public schools. This is critical. Only when the people have a firm grasp of history, the critical need to greatly limit the scope of government, an understanding of our Constitution, and the conviction that most people are capable of managing their own lives, will they have the means to wrest back control of our out-of-control government. Only then can we end the tyranny which is now single-mindedly squashing the right of the sovereign individual American to choose his own values and to pursue them in the management of his own life!