The New York Times, Racism, and Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson often notes that Dr. Martin Luther King believed that Black Americans should be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.  The New York Times responds by claiming that Tucker Carlson’s show is the “most racist program in the history of cable news.” 

There is much more of interest in The American Spectator article by Jeffrey Lord on the New York Times and its claims that Tucker Carlson is a racist.  Tucker once said that the mass immigration of illegals made America poorer and dirtier.  Of course the immediate effect of the immigrants lack of wealth and income was to make America poorer, but the dirtier comment was especially met with howls of protest.  Yet, many federal and state reports had previously noted that the illegal aliens had left huge amounts of garbage behind them along our border areas and very extensive and expensive clean-ups had been required over the years.  Tucker had to explain this was what he was alluding to, though it would have been better had he explained that immediately.  The New York Times made further attacks on Carlson, whose criticisms hit the sensitive nerve centers of the left so often.

The Lord article makes many interesting observations about The New York Times and racism.  For the record, the newspaper that claims to be the newspaper of the record, The New York Times, is owned by a family whose wealth derived from the ownership of slaves.  Adolph S. Ochs began his publishing career as owner of The Chattanooga Times before he acquired The New York Times.  Several of his family members had fought for the Confederacy.  His mother had smuggled medicine to the Confederate Army.  In 1900, Ochs’ New York Times editorialized that the Democratic Party “may justly insist that the evils of negro suffrage were wantonly inflicted on them.”  The Lord article notes that Ochs made many contributions to the erection of Confederate memorials. 

The New York Times has ever since been true to the Democratic Party that embraced and fought for slavery for many decades and then denied Black Americans the vote for many more decades.  To this day, The New York Times and the Democratic Party tell us we ought to judge people by the color of their skin.  They tell us that Black Americans cannot be competitive in a merit-based society, so we must declare any appreciation of merit to be racist.  The logical conclusion of their belief is that Black Americans should not even seek to develop merit in their character.  They still tell us it is racist to judge individuals by the content of their character, just as they did historically.  Give them credit for the consistency of their racism, even as you declare their beliefs terribly wrongheaded.

I look forward to the day when my granddaughters will be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.  That will not happen if The New York Times and the Democratic Party have their way.

Evil Biden wants to force Americans to register their guns and pay a high registration fee

Biden has a number of plans to discourage gun ownership.  Among them, he wants to raise the cost of gun ownership by holding gun manufacturer's responsible for any deaths or wounds caused by guns.  He also has a plan to force the registration of guns, which will be accompanied by a large registration fee.

Let us think about this as a matter of principle for a moment.  The right to defend oneself is a natural right and also an explicit constitutional right.  Freedom of speech is a natural right and also an explicit constitutional right.

Let us suppose that someone asks you if you think the person they want to marry will be a good lifetime partner for them.  You, as a friend, answer yes.  The marriage ends in divorce.  The divorced partner claims you are partially responsible for the suffering and perhaps financial losses they incurred due to the failure of their marriage.  Should they have the right to sue you for recovery of their losses?  Imagine if they could do this, what this would do to your ability to exercise your right to freedom of speech.  Whatever the actual impact your advice on the proposed marriage might have had, it was the responsibility of the individual receiving that advice to evaluate whether they should marry.  It was the responsibility of the married person to make the marriage work or if they could not do so, to realize that the mistakes or lack of effort were their own.

The gun manufacturer has no significant voice in how the gun they make is used.  It can be used rationally or irrationally.  It can be used responsibly or irresponsibly.  To hold the gun manufacturer responsible for the use of the gun is as nonsensical as holding the marriage advisor responsible for his advice.  Actually, I would be inclined to think that bad advice on marriage would make an easier case for responsibility for harm against the advisor.  At least the marriage advisor presumably has some knowledge of the two people whose marriage is being considered.

Gun registration and fees:  If the government can in principle claim the power to make you register as a gun owner and pay a high fee for doing so, what is to keep the government from next forcing everyone to register for the right to exercise freedom of speech and pay a high registration fee for doing so?  After all, if one right can be controlled, limited, and taxed if it is to be exercised then why would the government defer from doing the same to other rights -- freedom of speech included.  Just as the Democrat Socialist Party thinks guns can be used harmfully by hoodlums, so does that host of parasites believe that Deplorables do great harm with their speech.

Do you think the party of slavery, the early KKK, Jim Crow laws, the Woodrow Wilson second wave of the KKK, segregation, the welfare dependency of many American Blacks, mandatory government school holding pens minus education, that declared Trump voters Deplorables, and the party that has always thought it moral to steal elections, would not desire such control over our freedom to exercise our individual rights that all of them will not disappear unless we throw our minds, hearts, and souls into defending every one of them?

Prof. Walter E. Williams on the State of American Blacks

Professor Walter E. Williams, George Mason University, asks these very challenging questions of those who believe in the politically correct viewpoint of the Progressive Elitist and of those who simply do not think about such issues:

"Is the reason the black family was far healthier in the late-1800s and 1900s  because back then there was far less racial discrimination and greater opportunities?  Or, did what experts call "legacy of slavery" wait several generations to victimize today's blacks?"

When I ask similar questions, I am very frequently called a racist, though I am merely making the inquiries any rational person with a minimal knowledge of history and a normal respect for the abilities of one's fellow man would.  Even Prof. Williams is presented with a problem on how to get readers to acquire sufficient knowledge that he can ask these questions without having them simply dismiss him and the remainder of his article.  He provides several paragraphs of relevant black history in America before he chances posing these questions.  Those of us with such viewpoints as Prof. Williams are very much aware of the ignorance of those who vehemently claim the state of American blacks is explained by the "legacy of slavery."

His article is one that very much needs to be read by most "educated Americans", who are most noteworthy for their university-programed ignorance.  Our universities almost never have the intellectual integrity and courage to ask the questions Prof. Williams asks in this article.  They are unwilling to demonstrate how absurd the politically correct viewpoint is in the light of history, whereas Prof. Williams is a man of admirable courage and integrity.
He also does his homework.  All you have to do is read and a wee bit of thinking.  Of course, you are also welcome to check up on his facts.

If he is wrong about his facts, I want to hear about it.  I would not bet that he is, given that the formidable Dr. Thomas Sowell has a very similar viewpoint.  And while this may mean nothing to the reader, so did the highly esteemed Virginia Baker of Norfolk, Virginia.

Recalling the Vote on the 1964 Civil Rights Act - A History Lesson

It is now largely forgotten that a larger fraction of Republicans in both the House and the Senate voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act than did Democrats.  This is a reminder or a history lesson.

In the original bill in the House of Representatives the vote by party was:

Democrats for 152, out of 248 Democrats voting, 61.3% of them voted Yea

Republicans for 138, out of 172 Republicans voting, 80.2% of them voted Yea

In the Senate:

Democrats for 46, out of 67 Democrats voting, 68.7% of them voted Yea

Republicans for 27 out of 33 Republicans voting, 81.8% of them voted Yea

Yet today most Americans think that this civil rights law was opposed by Republicans, when the real opposition was always within the Democratic Party, just as the support for Jim Crow laws and for slavery itself had always been in the Democratic Party.

Is Obama the CEO of the Federal Government and ObamaCare?

Leaving aside the fact that Obama is not eligible to be President because he is not natural born, he is signing legislative bills as though he is the President.  One of the most notorious bills he signed was the fraudulently named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which he has adamantly backed.  Indeed, it is his signature achievement and he is happy to hear it called ObamaCare.  ObamaCare is failing in a colossal manner and it is clear that it is doing so so rapidly because Obama is not a functioning Chief Executive Officer (CEO).  To be sure, it had to fail and it was even designed to fail, but it was not supposed to fail while Obama was still pretending to be President.

The President of the United States of America is the CEO and the Chief Operations Officer of the federal government.  He is charged with protecting, defending, and preserving the Constitution while in office.  Obama does not take this task seriously and does not even believe the Constitution should be protected, defended, and preserved.  He said so explicitly when he was a state senator in the Illinois state legislature in a Chicago radio station interview.  In this, he is in agreement with Justice Ginsburg and many other Progressive Elitist Democrat Socialists.

Under the Constitution, the President is charged with executing and enforcing the laws of the United States.  Obama has failed to do that in the case of his signature achievement, ObamaCare, in many ways.  He has unilaterally changed its timetable on many of the mandates of the law and he has unlawfully granted many exemptions to factions among his supporters, such as labor unions or campaign contributors.

A key development necessary for the ObamaCare initiation was that the state exchanges for health care insurance plans that met the mandated requirements of the ObamaCare law, had to be made available to individuals so they could examine the coverage offered and determine what it would cost them.  To do this, they had to access the costs for their age and location and for their income level so subsidies could be calculated.  In addition, the website has to access data from the IRS, HHS, Social Security Administration, the Dept. of Homeland Security, and other sources to verify the identity of the person seeking the required health insurance costs and the information that individual supplied.  This required a complex program and access website.  The development of this website was entrusted to the Department of Health and Human Services.  The bureaucrats in that department then hired a number of contractors to perform much of the work, but kept a high level of control with ever-changing requirements on how the system would work.  Overlooking this Obama signature project that was taking a large measure of control over one-sixth of the economy and our vital medical care, was the CEO of the federal government.

With all of our lives most literally on the line, the CEO of the federal government was paying no attention at all to his duties.  He was present, but he was busy making speeches about how great ObamaCare was rather than directing his signature achievements development and implementation.  He played the role of company spokesman rather than that of CEO.  According to the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Obama had no idea that the website was going to fail.  None.  He was totally asleep at the wheel.  The biggest thing the government has ever done aside from fighting two world wars, the Civil War, and the War of 1812, was not important enough to capture even the least little bit of his attention.

To be sure, the real fault lies with the American People who twice voted for this community organizer with no executive experience to be the CEO and COO of the largest and most important organization in the world.  Then they allowed him to undertake the most massive transformation of the private sector and the American economy to give us the ObamaCare debacle.  Among the consequences of which are:

• Companies are dropping health insurance plans for their employees.
• Insurers are canceling millions of insurance plans that they say do not meet the requirements of ObamaCare, so the cancelled persons will have to buy new plans under ObamaCare.
• Insurers are cancelling the insurance plans of many people with pre-existing conditions.
• People are losing their jobs because providing them with health insurance under the ObamaCare requirements is becoming too expensive.  This will be especially true of young workers, who used to lower the overall cost of insurance to a company far more than they will in the future.  This made it worthwhile to train them and gave them time to learn their jobs.
• Jobs hours are being reduced to less than 30 hours a week.
• High quality medical care institutions are having to fire staff because many ObamaCare health insurance plans will discriminate against them due to their higher costs.  In some cases, as in New Hampshire, people close to good hospital systems will have to travel an hour to get to an ObamaCare covered hospital.
• The many health insurance plans discriminating against high quality medical institutions and their network of doctors will provide lower quality medical care.
• Future innovations in medical care will be much reduced by policy as tougher, more experimental operations and medical equipment investments are denied.
• Administrative costs for health insurance companies are going up due to false and inadequate information being given to them from the malfunctioning exchanges.
• Many young people will not be willing to fight the interminable battle to try to sign up for ObamaCare policies on the malfunctioning exchanges, thereby driving up insurance costs as only the sick and older people have enough incentive to fight that battle.
• Many young and healthy people will not sign up because the magnitude of the subsidy they are providing the sick and older people will shock them.  Paying the penalty tax will be much more affordable.
• Many people absolutely do not want to pay for many of the ten so-called essential health benefits, especially when what they may want is tagged with very high deductibles.
• Many will not sign up because the available plans will not allow them to keep the doctor they like or use the hospital they like.
• Many people will not sign up because ObamaCare violates their religious beliefs.
• Others will not sign up because they are unwilling to allow the government to get away with claiming its owns their bodies and minds, making them slaves.  They will not let the tyrants win.
• Some will not sign up because they know that the government that managed this train-wreck cannot be counted upon to keep their financial and medical data secure.  Not only would that take considerable network security, but huge numbers of people will have access to that data.  Having your bank account continuously emptied is far more crippling than paying the ObamaCare uncaring penalty tax.
• And who wants to be the subject of a Death Panel decision after going to all the trouble to get on ObamaCare?  It is probably safer to fly to Thailand or to Argentina for one's serious medical care.

The Falsely Framed Moral Evaluation of Capitalism

The Washington Post ran a long article on page 1 of its Outlook section on Sunday, 17 March 2013 entitled Is Capitalism Moral?  It was written by Steven Pearlstein, a Post columnist.  He claims that much of the reason for the stalemate in Washington is because the Republicans and Democrats have not really faced up to the question of whether Capitalism is moral or not.  He says that

The grand experiment with communism has been thoroughly discredited, a billion people have been lifted from poverty through free-market competition, and even European socialists have given up on state ownership and the nanny state.  Here at home, large swaths of the economy have been deregulated, and tax rates have been cut.  A good portion of what is left of government has been outsourced, while even education is moving toward school choice.  In embracing welfare reform, Americans have acknowledged that numerous programs meant to lift up the poor instead trapped them in permanent dependency and poverty.

This introduction to the Pearlstein article seems to bow to the power of Capitalism to do good, though it is always jarring to read that deregulation characterizes our government's efforts when about 80,000 pages of new regulations are added each year and the EPA is carrying out the Obama threat to kill the coal industry and coal-fired electric plants and to give us skyrocketing European gasoline prices.  The outsourced government continues to grow its many tentacles and keeps developing new tentacles such as those that sprout from the recent and still developing ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank "Too Big to Fail" acts.

Pearlstein notes that books by Arthur Brooks, of the American Enterprise Institute, and John Allison, of the Cato Institute, make a moral case for "even-freer-market capitalism than we have now."  The books he is referring obliquely to are:

Arthur C. Brooks, The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise, Basic Books, 2012.

John A. Allison, The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy's Only Hope, McGraw Hill, 2012.

Pearlstein characterizes their argument for capitalism as

As they see it, regulation is an infringement of individual liberty, while income redistribution, in the form of a progressive tax-and-transfer system, is nothing more than thievery committed against the most talented and productive by those who are not.  Regulation and redistribution, they contend, also undermine the vital incentives that drive capitalism, which throughout history has been the best system for freeing large masses of human beings from lives of misery and poverty.  What could be more moral, they ask, than that?

 Pearlstein even credits John Locke, Adam Smith, and Ludwig von Mises for their moral defenses of capitalism, before noting that the novels and writings of Ayn Rand really caused the idea of the morality of Capitalism to catch hold among "right-leaning intellectuals and politicians."

The remainder of this article mostly examines whether Capitalism is moral from Pearlstein's and frankly that of most people's perspective.  That perspective is implicit in the question he asks at the end of the article in his very last sentence:

If our moral obligation is to provide everyone with a reasonable shot at economic success, within a market system that, by its nature, thrives on unequal outcomes, then we ought to ask not just whether government is doing too much or too little, but whether it is doing the right things.

Basically, Pearlstein and most people believe that Capitalism is moral only if it is fair.  The bulk of the article is devoted to his belief that it is not really fair and loaded with implications that it must be controlled by government to see to it that it is as fair as possible.

One problem with judging the morality of Capitalism on the basis of whether it is fair or not is that even a toddler soon has a concept of fairness which need not have firm roots at all in a deep moral understanding.  It is extraordinarily common for the child to complain that it is not fair that her older brother always wins when they play Monopoly.  It is common that the younger sibling claims it is unfair that the older sibling can stay out to midnight on a Friday night with his friends or maybe even until 3 AM.  For many people, that concept of fairness evolves very little as they become adults.

The Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution understood that what government should do was not governed by fairness.  They understood that the legitimate role of government was, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, the protection of our equal, inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The role of government was simply to see that we were not forced by government or by others to give up making our own choices of values and prevented from taking action to try to acquire and keep our values, so long as we did not initiate the use of force against others.  Government had no role in deciding what values we should seek and no role in the distribution of those values among the people.

Those, who like Pearlstein, claim that the central government role is to ensure fairness in the distribution of values among the people must push government to decide what values really matter and how they will be distributed.  Commonly, they then think almost entirely in terms of income and worldly goods as the values of importance and those to be redistributed.  To concede that government has such a fairness role, is to concede that the Nanny State is proper.  It is to concede that the less developed person is right to constantly challenge the more developed person, or at least that those who have fewer worldly goods are right to challenge the government to redistribute those goods more in their favor or even totally unto equality in the distribution.

Of course a more developed concept of fairness might recognize that someone who chooses to watch NBC and CBS every evening for hours rather than working 12 or 14 hours in a day does not have a moral claim on the earnings or wealth of a person who did make the choice to work the longer hours.  After all, the TV watcher does not trade his relaxation and laughter in front of the TV in any meaningful way for the proceeds of the many additional hours worked by someone making a very different value choice.  Yet, most Americans exercise their limited sense of fairness to think that the TV watcher deserves to have a significant part, maybe even more than half, of what the hard worker made in his additional hours of work.

To a large degree, most people think fairness is about equality.  Yet, people are too complex and too highly differentiated for them to be equal.  They may have equal rights, but that is about the only way in which people are equal.  The Founding Fathers understood this, but they feared democracy largely because they understood that most people are governed too much by a desire for a simple-minded fairness, which drove them to desire equality and the redistribution of money and goods.  Yet, it cannot be fair to deprive the person who has acquired income and goods without the use of force of what he has acquired.  No system based on a forced redistribution can be fair.  Why set out in the name of fairness to redistribute income and goods when this necessarily means that one is unfairly doing harm to many and that fairness cannot be achieved?  Even Pearlstein allows that it is hard to know when to stop the process of redistribution.

The morality of Capitalism has the same basis as the morality of the entire private sector, only some of whose activities are devoted to the values of income and worldly goods.  There is no role for government in choosing who my friends will be and how many hours I am to spend with each of them for our mutual enjoyment.  The government that tried to redistribute my friendship time and effort would clearly be recognized as a tyranny.  There is no role for government in determining how fair it is that a woman of good character may or may not be loved by the man she wants to love her.  There is no role for government in deciding who we may choose for our domestic partner or partners, though that issue is still hotly debated with respect to same-sex marriage.  Many of the greatest values in each of our lives are properly seen by most of us as beyond the sphere of government rules for distribution.

Yet, for some childish and foolish reason, most adults do think that government has a role in re-distributing income and wealth.  I believe this is in large part because they ignore the fact that this is really a theft of the time an individual put into acquiring that income and wealth, including the time he may have spent preparing himself for earning it, as in his studies, his thinking about markets over many years, and his careful attention to details in his work.  Many seem to think that they have not subjected someone to slavery just because they are taking by force only half of every added dollar he earns rather than all of it.  In fact, a paper by Peter Diamond (MIT) and Emmanuel Saez (UC Berkeley) is making its rounds among the Progressive Elitists now that claims that the correct marginal tax on high income people is 73%.  I frankly cannot understand how they so deceive themselves that taking half or 73% of every additional hour worked from someone is not the moral equivalent of slavery.

Most slave owners in the Antebellum South allowed their slaves to spend a few hours working in their own gardens to grow some of their own food.  Did this mean that they were really not slaves because the slaveholder did not have them in his cotton or rice fields 100% of the time?  The Progressive Elitist might argue that they only make slaves of those who choose to be very productive in the marketplace, so if you participate in the market you are choosing to be a slave.  Of course they fear to be that honest, but they do say that if you make a lot of money you are choosing to pay the progressive taxes.

Yet, the person who spends time on other values, such as watching TV, going fishing, running, or spending time with friends or family is not taxed in any way.  That is not fair.  If it is right to progressively tax the person who chooses to spend time making money, then it is unfair to give the person who could have made money, but did not, a tax deduction for the money he failed to make.  Fairness demands that he be taxed for the value of his time that he spent in a different choice of values.  Yet, government knows that people will not stand for it to discourage other values such as time with family with a tax, so it acts in a manifestly unfair way on those who spend productive time making money through voluntary trades with others.  It does this even though it is generally recognized, even by Pearlstein, that such economic activity has done wonders in improving the standard of living for almost everyone, even the inveterate TV watcher.

Pearlstein's characterization of the market as much more free than it is provides him with some of his arguments that free markets do not work so well.  He also treats the arguments of people like Allison  unfairly.  For instance, he says

The conservative case against regulation, for example, is premised on the proposition that everything that has gone wrong with the markets is the government's fault.

 Well no, free market advocates realize that many businesses will fail in a perfectly free market and that there will be a business cycle in a free market with recessions from time to time.  They just object to the fact that government action in the market has the consequence of causing more business failures, more frequent and deeper recessions, and in the present case a recession that seems to have no foreseeable end.

Pearlstein claims that free market advocates say that

Because pursuit of self-interest is the essential ingredient in a market system, it somehow follows that individuals and firms are free to act as greedily and selfishly as they can within the law, absolved from any moral obligations.

I do not think there are many who believe they are "absolved from any moral obligations" in their actions.  Pearlstein in particular seems to imply that Allison holds this view.  I have not read his book, but the way Pearlstein describes Allison's viewpoint leaves quite a large leap to the conclusion that Pearlstein seems to impose on Allison's viewpoint.  I surely do not believe that a businessman is only morally obliged to obey the law and that he is morally allowed to otherwise act immorally.  Indeed, that is a clearly immoral viewpoint, which an advocate of Capitalism on moral grounds is most unlikely to make.  But Allison correctly notes that when government uses a heavy hand in making moral decisions in the marketplace, the many laws that claim to define moral actions and value choices in the marketplace will naturally become a substitute morality for many people.  If Pearlstein wants everyone in the market to act morally, then he should remove the government from the market as much as possible so that people will understand that they must act morally in the market, rather than just obeying the laws.  Government morality acts as bad money does to drive good money out of the market.

Pearlstein repeats the liberal argument that economic success often is due to dumb luck.  Some have the good fortune to be born with the right genes and the right parents, to grow up in a good community, to be better educated, to be better mentored, and to be at the right place at the right time.   They argue that the market should reward virtue, not dumb luck.

Well OK, we like to see virtue rewarded.  But, in a system in which market success means that everyone involved in a voluntary transaction has entered into it because he believes he is better off for having participated in it, how is anyone hurt if someone in the transaction was lucky?  Everyone still benefited.  We all want the freedom to be lucky, do we not?  We may be lucky in a business transaction one day also.  Or, maybe we were lucky enough to meet the love of our lives 40 years ago.  Apparently liberals believe that luck should be re-distributed also.  So, why is it only luck in financial terms to be redistributed?  Did I not realize a greater value in having the luck to meet Anna than someone else has had who is unhappily married for the third time?  As in the marketplace, virtues and luck both play roles in our love lives.  Luck is not something to be redistributed and rationed among us.  Our luck and misfortunes are generally properly beyond the reach of government.  Yes, we may well choose to recognize that some people have suffered more misfortune in life than others in our private charity work or contributions, but this is not a proper function of government.  Rightly, there is no grant of power for the purpose in the Constitution.

Pearlstein continues to argue against the perceived fairness of the marketplace.  He says that 20 years ago wage and salary earners reliably captured about 75% of the national income, with the rest going to capital providers.  More recently, labor has only received about 67%.  I expect there are reasons for such a shift that make sense.  One is that there is a decrease in union labor in the private sector.  Another is that there is an increase in the importance of knowledge and professionalism and both are more and more often tied to capital and the founders of businesses.  Still another is that complex law and regulation has insulated very large companies from upcoming competition.  Another is the huge influxes of taxpayer money to companies such as Goldman Sachs, CitiBank, Bank of America, GE, GM, Lockheed Martin, Solyndra, and A123 Systems in recent years.  Corporate welfare seems to be a staple of Progressive Elitist government even as it pretends it is not.

Pearlstein claims that 50 years ago, the typical corporate executive earned less than 50 times the pay of the average front-line worker.  He says the ratio is now 350 to 1.  He implicitly believes this is a statement that morality is defied here.  I expect he is comparing the few large corporations of 50 years ago in a much smaller US economy with today's corporations acting in a much larger US economy and in a much larger world economy.  If he chose to compare the mid-sized companies and large small businesses today with similar sized businesses by income of 50 years ago, the ratios would be much more similar.  That is, compare the ratio in a $100 million income company today with a $100 million income company of 50 years ago and the ratio will be much less dissimilar.  Neither 200 years ago, 100, 50, or last year did most companies even have a 50 to 1 ratio.  That ratio is a phenomena of size.

Pearlstein laments the fact that inequality of income in the market threatens to overwhelm the ability of a progressive tax-and-transfer system to keep up with it.  So yes, Pearlstein simply assumes that income equality is a requirement of a moral economic system, despite the fact that almost no one advocates equality in other aspects of our private lives.  His, and that of most Progressive Elitists, is a very childish moral code.  It is manifestly biased in the application of equality and it absolutely refuses to recognize that individuals are highly complex and differentiated.  It refuses to recognize that as a result, we make very different value choices and bring very different abilities to bear on acquiring the values we choose.  It just assumes that using force to redistribute income and wealth is good.  It just assumes that largely enslaving those who make good money in the voluntary and mutually beneficial marketplace is justified as for the greater good.  It also assumes that it is right and proper to redistribute luck, but only luck operating in the market.  What an absolutely weird, yet common, idea of morality this is!

A society with a very limited government whose only function is to protect our equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own body, mind, and labor, and the pursuit of personal happiness is the only society in which people are free to be moral.  They are then free to be moral in the entire private sector of their activities, including that subset of economic activities in the market.  Capitalism is moral for the same reason that other human action dedicated to the free choice of values and the freedom to pursue them is moral.  Capitalism is moral because it allows these choices of value by each individual in the marketplace.  It is moral as an exercise in our individual right to freedom of association to cooperate with others as we choose for financial reward, just as in other aspects of our lives we are free to associate with others as friends and lovers and family.  Our labor belongs to each of us by right and we trade it with others in some cases for monetary gain and in other cases as part of a family to instruct a child or to do the dishes and laundry.  Government has no moral obligation to equalize any of the rewards that we get from exercising our freedom of association or the use of our time.  Indeed, if it tries to do so, it has violated our individual rights and done an evil deed.

Betrayal: Republican House Votes to Fund ObamaCare Again

Once again the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has betrayed our individual right to own our own bodies.  They have again sold our bodies to the government for momentary power for themselves.  On a vote of 267 - 151, a continuing resolution to fund the government for the remainder of the 2013 fiscal year was passed.

Only 14 Republicans voted against this monstrously tyrannical act.  Many, many representatives who had pledged they would defund ObamaCare voted in favor of funding ObamaCare.  What is more, the 2010 Pledge to America to post bills up for a vote online for 72 hours was violated.  The efforts of 14 Republicans to defund or to at least keep funding from infringing upon religious freedoms was beaten down by the Republican Establishment.

This Establishment has been re-asserting itself so it can maintain control of the party in the face of efforts of the Tea Party and libertarians to make the Republican Party a true party of limited government and a defender of individual rights.  This heinous act of betrayal by the great mass of the Republican Party representation in Congress must not be forgotten or forgiven.  These unprincipled men must be replaced.

The only principled Republican Representatives were:

Justin Amash (Mich.)
Jim Bridenstine (Okla.)
Paul Broun, M.D. (Ga.)
Ron DeSantis (Fla.)
Scott DesJarlais, M.D. (Tenn.)
John J. Duncan Jr. (Tenn.)
Phil Gingrey, M.D. (Ga.)
Louie Gohmert (Tex.)
Jack Kingston (Ga.)
Tom McClintock (Calif.)
Thomas Massie (Ky.)
Bill Posey (Fla.)
Matt Salmon (Ariz.)
Steve Stockman (Tex.)

These men are heroes.

The rest of the Republicans are villains.  It was in their power to prevent the funding of ObamaUncaringTax during this critical period of its implementation.  Instead, they calculated that it was politically expedient to lay their hands upon our throats and strangle the last vestige of self-ownership until it is dead.

If we do not own our very bodies, are we not slaves?  Yes.

Is the power held by any slave-master ever legitimate?  No.

What Percent are You?

The Occupy Wall Street crowd claims to stand with the 99% against the 1%.  A conservative news service points out that the 1% earn more than $506,000 a year.  But when it comes to figuring out legitimate government policy, we are not characterized sufficiently by our income.  In fact, our income ought to be as irrelevant as race, religion, sex, or sexuality in government policy.  Making it as important as it is commonly made is highly materialistic.  Note that it is the socialist left that makes the most of income and in that shows its lack of spirituality and its extreme materialism.

Is it not odd that if a man takes the risks of owning his own company and works 70 hours a week and therefor someday may make a higher income than a man who takes a nice, safe 40 hour a week job as an employee and who watches TV for 30 hours a week, the hardworking businessman is taxed more?  The businessman is required to be an unpaid tax collector, is held responsible for all of his employee's safety, is forced to pay for the unemployment of employees whether they ever worked for his company or not, and is supposed to see to it that his company complies with more than 200,000 pages of often-conflicting regulations or suffer crippling fines.  The businessman may very well have 45 hours of his life each week taken by force from him for government purposes.  The employee is more likely to have only 6 or 8 hours of his life claimed by government each week.  These hours taken by force are the equivalent of slavery.

By what right does government enslave one man for many more hours a week than another?  Worse yet, the government really only does it for the same reason that Willy Sutton robbed banks.  That is where the money is.  It just is not easy for the government to figure out how to take anything it wants out of the 30 hours a week our hypothetical employee is watching TV.  The government simply wants to steal and it is easy to steal from the hardworking businessman, whether it is his mandated service to the government collecting taxes, complying with regulation, or as safety inspector and provider, or the money he earned with his time.  The government is clearly just Willy Sutton.

It is absurd that people spend so much time characterizing themselves in terms of their income.  Legitimate government has the sole purpose of protecting the equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of personal happiness.  As far as government policy is concerned there are only two numbers that characterize each of us.  They are 1 and 0.0000000032.  You do know what the later number is, do you not?

Slavery Resurrection Plan by Democrat Congress

HR5741 requires every American between the ages of 18 and 42 to serve the federal government for two years as the President sees fit.  Uniformed armed services, Homeland Security, and civilian community service are covered.  Every American of the age range from 18 to 42 will be medically and mentally evaluated for suitability for service.  This measure is being pushed by Democrats, including Charles Rangel.

I find myself wondering if this is the means by which some Democrats wish to hold onto power in the face of the rising opposition to the socialist program of the Democrats, many of whom greatly admire the power of thugs such as Hugo Chavez and the Communist Party in China to get their way with the people by the simple expedient of using force to quell their individual rights.  Suppose the Tea Party movement actually succeeds in voting the socialists out of power, will they step down or will they declare a national emergency while calling the Tea Party enthusiasts racists and terrorists?  Will they call those enthusiasts to service and use military discipline to control them?  Will they use Democrat and socialist enthusiasts called to service to quell the demands of the Tea Party enthusiasts that the federal government obey the Constitution?  One has to wonder why voluntary service is not recognized as serving our rational national security interests very well.

Once again, there is good reason to wonder why some people wish to ignore the 13th Amendment of the Constitution outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude.  This is just another step of the sort that ObamaCare took in claiming implicitly that no individual owns his own body.  Our bodies have already been claimed by the federal government and now many in the ruling socialist cabal want to claim two years of our lives as theirs to dispose of.  Worse yet, Congress wants to assign that power to the President.  This bill must be defeated and the ObamaCare expropriation of our bodies must be repealed.  It will never make sense to say that each American has an equal and sovereign individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if we do not.

Obama Creates Jobs and Congressional Districts

Obama's Recovery.gov website claims to document the number of jobs the Stimulus Bill has created or saved.  It reported that 640,329 jobs were created or saved and was helpful enough to break those jobs down by congressional district.  The Washington Examiner has now added up the numbers of as-yet known fictitious jobs saved or created and has reached a number of 76,779.

Just to refresh your memory, the $787 billion 2009 Stimulus Bill was said to have created or saved the 640,329 jobs at a cost of $1,229,056 in terms of the allocated money.  To adjust for the fact that the government has proven very slow in actually spending the money and will not spend much of it until after the actual recession is long gone, the government claimed to have created these jobs at a cost of $531,250 per job.  Now we can adjust this cost per job for the maximal number of jobs which may have been created, 563,550.  The cost per job is then $603,628 per job.  Wow, I am impressed.  The Obama government may be able to create one job with a sum of money that the private sector would create about 12 jobs with.  Of course as we discover that more of these created jobs are fictitious, the cost per job will go up and the private sector will look ever more efficient in creating jobs.  And we ought not forget that the biggest actual effect of the $787 billion Stimulus Bill was to discourage the private sector from hiring for fear that the heavy government deficit spending would decrease business profits over the longer run as it caused inflation, weakened the dollar, and was used by governments to cause mischief.

The Obama Recovery.gov website has also shown us that this $18 million construct creates fictitious Congressional Districts.  It has created 440 such fictitious Congressional Districts.  In reality, there are 435 legitimate Congressional Districts.  Now as I recall, Obama campaigned at one point in 57 states and thought he had one more state to get to in order to have campaigned in all of the states.  That makes 58 states.  Now, of course, my readers all know there are 50 states, so Obama inflated the number of states by only a factor of 1.16.  The number of Congressional Districts has been Obama-inflated by 2.01, so Obama is gaining skills in inflationary power as he gains presidential experience!

Just to look at the case for Virginia, which has 11 Representatives and therefore has Congressional Districts numbering from 1 to 11, Recovery.gov lists the following fictitious Virginia districts:

00, 12, 13, 17, 21, 25, 36, 51, 79, 98

This is actually a below average degree of Congressional District inflation!  But I really get a kick out of District 00 and the fact that District 98 implies that Virginia is much the most populous state in the Union!  This takes us right back to the earliest days of the Union, when the Commonwealth of Virginia was just that.

The 12th and 13th Congressional Districts of Virginia were lost after the 1860 Census, and the 17th and 21st Districts were lost after the 1840 Census!  Democrats always have been very good at getting the votes of the dead, so it should be no surprise that they are also able to resurrect dead Congressional Districts when it suits their purposes.  Interesting thought.  Does this mean that we have underestimated Obama's powers as the Messiah?  What if he is creating jobs in Virginia prior to 1860 and 1840?!!!!!  This would mean he was aiding the cause of slavery in Antebellum Virginia.

Remember that for Obama and socialists of his ilk, the truth is that which furthers the cause of socialism.  It has nothing whatever to do with reality.

Changes for Doctors and Patients Under ObamaCare

The House bill 3200HR is one of the bills being folded together in some mysterious way in Congress.  The Senate has some Democrat Senators and Rahm Emanuel huddled behind closed and locked doors meshing together the Health Committee bill and the Finance Committee bill, which seems to have become 1500 pages long suddenly after the Finance Committee voted on a conceptual plan a bit under 300 pages long.  We do not know precisely what the ill-chosen provisions of the final passed bill will be, but the way everything is being rushed and so much is being hidden, we have to evaluate as much as we can from the available information, or we will be caught flat-footed when the final version is rushed blindly through Congress.

Here are a few provisions of HR 3200 we had best take note of:

• Doctors are in the public option unless they opt out.  There is no mechanism for opting out.  The Secretary of Health and Human Services will set up a mechanism someday and it may include penalties, fines, taxes, and who knows what other disincentives.  In effect, the plan is to make doctors slaves who may then have some onerous option to buy their freedom, their manumission.
• The paperwork required of doctors has been increasing rapidly over the last 15 years.  This bill will increase it much more, cutting down on patient time, attendance at seminars and on post-graduate education.  They will have to document all interactions with the many new federal bureaucracies to be set up, as well as the greatly expanded ones.  They will have to document all referrals, determine if there are fraud risks, and continually update quality assessments.  They will be bored to death!
  
• The expanded patient records will include copious financial records, medical data, mental health evaluations, and such things as any sexually transmitted infectious diseases.  This data will be available to huge numbers of medical people and to many bureaucrats.  Imagine what the Democrats will do with this information on a Republican running for public office?  Apparently, they will use such information on that Republican's entire family, if we can extrapolate from Sarah Palin's case.
• If patient's must be readmitted to a hospital after being released, there are fines.  Those with chronic diseases, the disabled, and the elderly are most likely to be readmitted.  Doctors and hospitals will become reluctant to treat such people because they inherently bring with them an increased likelihood of fines due to readmission.  There will be attempts to transfer such patients to other facilities.
• End-of-life counseling will be required as part of the regular medical practice.  The government will train and approve the counselors.  It will provide the films, brochures, and the data to be given to the patients.  It is expected that this advice will be for them to forgo more than ordinary medical treatments and play upon their guilt in being a burden.  The health czar, Ezekiel Emanuel, believes doctors are obsessed with the Hippocratic Oath.  He serves on an advisory panel for the Hastings Center which states that patients should reject ordinary and extraordinary care and accept death.
  

The Coming Energy Takeover

Amidst all the furor over the government attempt to takeover the health care industries, their efforts to take over the control of energy use is receiving less attention. The Waxman-Markey carbon tax and trade bill has passed the House of Representatives, but the Senate has not been eager to take it up. When a medical services takeover bill has been passed, Democrat pressure will mount on the Senate to return to putting restrictions on energy. They may not agree with a plan as drastic as the House plan, but they will no doubt agree to doing considerable damage to the economy and to the interests of the People. Even if they do nothing, the EPA is declaring CO2 a pollutant and will itself cause massive damage to the economy through its open-ended regulatory powers.

A front page article in the Washington Times on 17 August 2009 proved very interesting to me. Its thrust was that a huge growth of Federal bureaucracies was going to be required by the Waxman-Markey bill if it is enacted. This itself is interesting, but the most interesting point in the article was a quote of Bart Chilton, the commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. His commission will regulate the trading of carbon allowances. He is looking forward to expanding the size of his commission for the task by 31%, though I expect the expansion will be much greater than that. But, his most interesting comment was:

"It [the carbon allowances trading market] could be a $2 trillion market within five years."

Well, the entire U.S. GDP was about $14.3 trillion in 2008 and is a bit smaller in 2009 due to the recession. Slow growth is expected in the next several years. In five years when Chilton expects the carbon allowances market he will regulate to be $2 trillion in size, perhaps the GDP will be $14 or 16 trillion, bearing in mind that the health care bill which will be passed, the refusal to allow drilling, the destruction of the coal industry, the continued pandering to labor unions at the expense of investors and civil liberties, the plundering of the wealthy and productive, and the renewal of class and racial warfare generally promoted by the Democrats will be unchecked given their control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. In other words, they will be doing all the right things, if one wants stagnation, which they clearly do.

So, the critical assessment here is that a $2 trillion carbon allowance market affects business and the People just as a $2 trillion tax increase would. Sure, not all of that money is going to the government, but just as when we send our money to the government, that money will have been spent for nothing. OK, maybe 25% of the money we send to the government is spent for something of value, such as defense, some police powers, some interstate roads (the post roads of the Constitution?), etc. Now as I see it, every penny spent on carbon allowances is wasted money. Yes, that waste will prompt some companies to spend more money on energy conservation, but they could have done that anyway without the waste of the carbon allowances market. So, all of this money is wasted. The government is going to spend about $4 trillion this year, so the usual rule would say that $3 trillion of this is wasted money. Except given the bailouts, a larger fraction than usual is wasted. Projections say that federal spending over the next two years will be about $3.5 trillion. Applying the 25% rule to this, about $2.6 trillion of these expenditures will be wasted.

Adding the mandated additional waste of $2 trillion in the carbon allowances market to the $2.6 trillion in wasted money in the federal expenditures, one finds that we can expect a waste of $4.6 trillion out of a total economy of about $15 trillion. So, we are going to soon waste 30.7% of the U.S. economy, if a bill similar to Waxman-Markey is passed by Congress! Government is not going to be treading lightly on the American People. No, it is going to stomp us into the ground! Then to this we will have to add the mischief of the so-called health care reform.

Actually, this is still an underestimate of the weight of government on our economy. Freedom from government day this year was 12 August, which means that about 62% of the economy is already taken by government. This would then be (0.62) ($14.3 trillion) = $8.9 trillion! Now, if we add the $2 trillion carbon allowance market to this, we get $10.9 trillion going to government altogether or being wasted at government requirement. Of a $15 trillion economy a few years down the road, this means that government will control at least 73% of the economy!

This being the case, we will be working for government about 73% of the time in a few years if Waxman-Markey becomes law. One would think that almost anyone would have enough sense to see themselves as the slave they are under such circumstances. How could any such person even imagine they are an American? When American fundamental principles of government disappear, when our government's function is no longer to preserve and protect the sovereign rights of the individual, does America even exist anymore? Is American just a continental area and the people who happen to reside there? Or are America and the American People defined by their fundamental commitment to the rights of the individual? I think it is the latter. Everyone but Americans may find it adequate to be defined by the land on which they live and little else, but we Americans should be defined by our individualistic ideals!

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would oversee the day-to-day trading of carbon allowances and is estimating that it will need to expand its personnel by 20 - 30%. The EPA will need to expand greatly. It is supposed to regulate 6 billion tons of CO2 emissions from 7,400 facilities under the House bill. It is now regulating only 330 million of other emissions. The CBO thinks $8 billion is needed for the expansion of federal regulatory agencies to monitor Waxman-Markey over 10 years. This figure is absurdly low in my opinion. For the bill to be effective, the CBO thinks about 1,500 regulations will be needed and mandates will have to be approved by at least 21 federal agencies. No one will have a clue what is going on for years!

The huge uncertainties of how Waxman-Markey will be applied to industry, businesses, and individuals will add monstrously to the $2 trillion in new "taxes" this program will bring on. No business will be able to plan for the future. Heck, even home owners will have no idea if they will be able to heat or air condition their homes in the future.

As I have been saying: "The Democrats are the party of Mass-Destruction." How funny that this is all being done in the name of the man-made global warming farce the Democrats are so deeply embedded in. Could they ever find a way to mash their faces into more eggs? OK, it would be funny if they were not trying so hard to commit America to self-immolation and if the American People had not so completely handed the keys to the nation, the banks, industry, and our homes to them.

Compromise - The Road to Socialism

Last night, I heard Bill O'Reilly say that compromise is always good. He is not unusual among Americans in saying that. When reasonable people get together and attempt to find a way to work with one another to achieve a goal they share, compromise often is worth everyone's effort.

But..... When someone who believes in the rights of the individual is confronted by a socialist, any compromise between them moves the freedom-loving individualist down the road to serfdom. Compromise is no longer good. It is the primary means through which the persistent socialists have robbed most benevolently-minded and non-confrontational Americans of one precious freedom after another.

For those of us who believe that everyone has individual rights, each fifty-fifty compromise on a freedom with the socialists results in our losing half of whatever freedoms we were still allowed to enjoy. Two compromises, and we have only a quarter of our freedom. Frankly, when one has less than half a freedom, it would seem clear to me that one's condition with respect to that freedom is best characterized as slavery.

Let us suppose we drive a hard bargain in each confrontation and we only lose 20% of the freedom each time. At the end of 3 compromises, one has only a 0.512 fraction of the freedom left. This is barely better than slave status. After 5 compromises, one's freedom is less than a third of what it should be.

The compromiser is guaranteed a loss of all of his freedoms over time, because the socialist, who loves using the force of government and loves confrontation, always comes back to demand more. The socialist can always compromise to his advantage. There is, however, no way to compromise one's way back to freedom.

Those who would be free, must be prepared to never compromise their freedoms. They must fight every fight as though their lives depend upon the outcome, because they do. They must fight with no thought of surrender and with no quarter, because only evil-doers prosper from the compromise of the freedoms of the individual. The rational domain for compromise does not include our freedoms!

Slaves Work, the Governments Spend

I will keep this brief. Anyone in their right mind knows the government is spending our money like a drunken sailor on prostitutes, gambling, drinking, and drugs. But, it is still alarming to measure that spending against the GDP:

1987 21.6% of GDP
1997 19.6% of GDP
2007 20.0% of GDP
2009 27.4% of GDP

This does not measure the costs of ever-increasing regulatory compliance or the equivalent of 3.8 million man-years spent on tax filing and planning. It also gives no information on the many unfunded liabilities, such as those to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. It does not add in the costs of the upcoming government "reformed" health care program or any other spending plans of our thoroughly socialist government. As I recall, in recent years we have actually been spending about 44% of GDP on all government taxes and mandates. Since the figures from the CBO above show a sudden 7.4% jump in the federal government expenditures and many states have been increasing taxes, it appears that the total cost of government is already above 50%, probably at least 52%!

If 52% of everything we produce is taken by government, are we not more slaves than free men? The Democrat leadership has been saying their opposition is Un-American. I thought it was Un-American to be a slave!

CNN Reporter: Are you aware we are giving you glass beads and shiny objects?

Susan Roesgen did an infamously horrendous interview with a man with a very young child and a sign that says she is already deep in debt at the Chicago Tea Party on 15 April, which you should check out here, if you have not yet seen it. She asks the man why he is there and allows him a two sentence explanation in which he says that Obama says he agrees with Lincoln, but Lincoln believed in personal freedom. Susan Roesgen interrupted him in a very aggressive voice. "What does this have to do with taxes? What does this have to do with your taxes? Do you realize you are eligible for a $400 credit?" The man tries to reply, but Susan interrupts immediately with "Did you know that the state of Lincoln gets $50 billion out of this stimulus?"

The man tries again to speak, but he is clearly flustered and repeats himself, while someone, perhaps a CNN cameraman, keeps shouting "Sir" at him as though he is trying to control him, perhaps to keep him from attacking the reporter. The man is still holding his child and showing no indication that he is about to attack her, so it looks as though CNN is trying to create a message of violence from nothing. Then the reporter backs away and starts saying that this is clearly not family viewing and she cannot hear. Some crowd members had shouted at her to shut up, which was actually rather reasonable given that the interview was clearly a pretense and her purpose was clearly to be the primary speaker rather than a listener. She also said that the crowd was composed of radical right wingers stirred up by the right wing Fox network.

What I am most interested in is the implication that a man with a small child and probably a wife is supposed to drop to his knees when told that he has no reason to complain about lost liberties because the socialists have paid for his soul, his daughter's soul, and his wife's soul with a $400 tax credit. This gives us deep insight into the souls of these "progressives." There is an ambiguity here. Which is it that the "progressive" believes?

• A father, a wife, and a child together should be happy to sell their freedom, and hence their souls, for a $400 tax credit, or a small part of the $1300 that a southern plantation owner might pay for a prime male field hand in 1837 dollars.
• The progressive believes the fair market value of the freedom of a man, his wife, and his child is $400.
• The man is too stupid to know that he is valuing the freedom of his wife, his child, and himself at a mere $400.

It may be that the "progressive" believes any of these or any combination of these. We will have to live with the uncertainty, but we do know that none of the above beliefs make "progressivism" anything less than monstrous.

Susan also believed it a fair means of purchase to offer his state of Illinois $50 billion of stimulus money. Now, this does figure out to be about $3890 per person (using a state population of 12,852,548 estimated in July 2007). But, it was clear from the in debt sign this man was holding under his child that he understands that this surplus windfall will have to be paid by him and his child. Is that not part of the very debt he was complaining about? How can this "progressive" reporter, so bright as to be hired by CNN, have made such a fallacious argument?

This pretentious, foolish, and insulting young woman is very representative of a large segment of the young "progressives." She is most enlightening and a most horrifying ghoul. Yet, she is a great example of the prime product of our public school system and of our universities. These people actually do believe that liberty is worth very little and it should be easily purchased with bobbles and beads offered by the socialist elite to the vast unthinking rabble of America.

I hope Americans continue rapidly with the process of understanding how threatened our liberties are by Obama and his 40 "progressive" Thieves. These Tea Parties indicate that this process is further underway than one could have imagined during the last Presidential and Congressional elections. The socialists clearly believed there was no longer anyone in their way and able to block them from forming a socialist tyranny. They will do great harm before they are stopped, but it is beginning to look as though there is some hope that they will be. We need to see bigger protests soon and we need to see people become more coherent in stating their purposes in opposing socialism and in espousing the sovereign freedom of the individual.

Tax Slavery

We should all be keenly aware that we not only pay taxes, but we also bear costs in the time it takes to keep records for tax purposes and to fill out tax forms. We should also be very aware of the costs in general of our time to abide with such government regulations as are irrational and excessive.

It is not really the tax money itself that we should be focused on. We should be focused on the cost in our time to taxes, regulations, and mandates. Viewed that way, it is much clearer that we are not the masters of that time. Our masters in Washington and in our state and local governments are taking those hours of our lives from us. To the degree that those governments exceed their proper role of serving as the protectors of our sovereign individual rights, they are enslaving us. In our time, government violations of this rule for good government are so prevalent that the great majority of the time represented by taxes, regulations, and mandates is that time we serve as Slaves.

Most Americans greatly underestimate the amount of taxes that they pay. We are taxed on our incomes for Social Security, Medicare, unemployment taxes (both state and federal), and Workman's Compensation Insurance. You may argue that the employer pays some of these taxes, but that is a pretense. They all really come out of your pocket. You are generally hit with sales taxes, utility taxes, luxury or bad habit taxes, tariffs, corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, license fees, car registrations, title fees on cars and homes, real estate taxes, higher food costs due to farm subsidies, fuel taxes, inflation, and death taxes. Very few people have any idea how much they are paying in taxes. Almost everyone thinks it is far less than it is. For instance, almost no one thinks they pay corporate taxes. But they do every time they buy something made by a corporation. And how many realize that the time their employer spends on accounting, on paying payroll taxes, on filing other taxes, and paying real estate and property taxes is all taking away other uses of money and time which could have been used to make the company stronger.

I am sure that many of you are still busy filing your taxes. I still have to do mine. But, when you can, you should pay more attention to the many costs of government that you are paying with your time and money. You should then carefully assess whether the services you get are really worth what is taken from you. You should also think about whether governments taking your time and money has a moral or an immoral justification.

Why did banks take TARP money?

Many healthy banks have reported that they were forced to take TARP money even though they did not need it. Today, Judge Andrew Napolitano, said on FOX News that the chief executive of a $250 billion asset bank told him that his bank was threatened with 5 consecutive years of tax audits by the IRS if the bank did not take the TARP money (bank bailout money) that it did not want to take. The Secretary of the Treasury, who did not pay his own taxes, is apparently very comfortable in using the power of the IRS to make others miserable to further the cause of fascist socialism. If the government would use this fascist tactic, it would undoubtedly be likely to use other tactics equally reprehensible to force banks to take TARP money they did not need and did not want. The banks are heavily regulated, which undoubtedly gives the Federal government a huge degree of power over them.

This may explain why the very free market oriented BB&T Bank, whose Chairman John Allison requires high-level bank executives to read Atlas Shrugged and donates money to colleges which introduce Ayn Rand's works into the curriculum, disappointed many of us by taking TARP money. Earlier reports that bankers were forced into a room in Washington and told that they would not be allowed to leave until they accepted the TARP money were apparently not exaggerations. As we now know, those banks who were force-fed TARP money are now under either the direct control of the Federal government or being threatened with it if their policies do not comply with the Federal government wishes. The latter state is little different from the former. If you must do something because someone is holding a gun to your head, then you clearly have no real control and you are nothing but a slave.

Many bankers do not wish to be slaves. Many banks are offering to pay back the government the money given them with interest. The government is refusing to allow the larger banks to do this, though they have taken some payoffs from the smaller banks given money. Why are they refusing to allow banks to pay off their loans? Why did they force them to take the money in the first place? The answer is clear. This money loan was a pretext to gain control of the banks and the Federal government does not want to relinquish that control. Fascism is both tempting and addictive to the kind of politicians who seek to control our government. Government is then used as the tool to gain control not just of banks and auto companies, but of each and every one of us individuals. Of course, they offer various social program bribes to individuals under the same principle as the TARP loans as a means to gain control of us individually.

Governments in the United States have long been trekking down the road to fascist socialism, but the pace of the forced march has picked up markedly since Obama has been united with the Democrat-controlled Congress. We individual Americans have been like frogs placed in a very deep pot on the stove and the heat has been turned up gradually until recently. This has kept us sluggish and pacified. We are now being put to the boil. When the boiling is done, we are all to be one intermixed, indifferentiable mush. The socialist ideal of equality in total poverty will have been accomplished. Unless we strive most mightily to jump out of this deep pot of water immediately.

Union Representation Card Check Legislation

Labor unions are doing very well in the public sector, where they have been very successful in organizing government workers. In the private sector, they are in deep trouble. In the 1950s they had 35% of private sector workers organized, but now they have only 7% in the private sector. Consequently, they have become desperate to find a way to improve their numbers in the private sector. The card check legislation, which was passed by the House in 2007, but defeated in the Senate, is once again Labor's number one lobbying priority.

Presently, if a labor union persuades 30% of the non-management employees of a company to check a card saying they are interested in labor union representation, the company must either accept the union as the sole bargaining agent of all of its non-management employees or call for a secret ballot election managed by the National Labor Relations Board of the Labor Department. Currently, labor unions win more than 50% of such secret ballot elections. This system is one full of injustice. First, it is wrong to require a company to negotiate labor contracts against its will with anyone or any organization. Company owners are not obliged to provide a job to anyone, except by their choice. When they are forced to do so, they have become slaves to their employees. Second, it is wrong to force those employees who do not wish to join a labor union to do so, unless the management freely chooses to make that a condition of employment, which they do have the right to do.

But this already union-skewed system is not enough for the labor unions. Clearly, workers have seen that unions are often very effective in destroying companies, which makes their continued employment very dubious. A very good illustration of this presently is the need for General Motors to go bankrupt, so an organization can emerge from its ruins which is not chained to many extremely uncompetitive concessions made to the labor unions. Many employees in the private sector have clearly understood the risks of joining a labor union and have chosen not to do so.

The union answer was to have Rep. George Miller (D of CA) introduce the so-called Employee Free Choice Act once again, which in the best tradition of Congress is anything but what its title suggests. This is more commonly called the card check legislation. It will require a company to recognize a union as the sole bargaining representation of all of its employees if 50% of them check off a card saying they want union representation. A union may be forced upon a company and those employees who do not want union representation even before they know that an attempt is being made to organize the workers of the company. There may never be an opportunity for the company and uninterested workers to make any counter arguments. It is also very clear that union organizers can put very great pressure on the last few employees they need to reach the 50% critical number for unionization. The secret ballot need no longer stand in their way.

This process of unionization is so easy that it can be readily applied to very small companies, which will be especially vulnerable to being taken over before they even know they are under attack. There is nothing to prevent the unionization of even very small Mom and Pop businesses. These businesses do not have the legal resources to contend with the unions. These small-time entrepreneurs have often suffered through years of personal privation to build a stable company and to get to the point where they could hire a few employees. In many cases, the lowest paid employee in such a company may be the founder of the company, who is still foregoing salary income in order to build his business. Yet, this struggling owner/manager is now forced to employ employees backed by hordes of lawyers from the union and to pay them still greater multiples of pay and benefits relative to his own pay. He may be providing them with health benefits already, which law does not allow him to provide for himself.

This proposed legislation further imposes the requirement that the company must enter into negotiations with the union within 10 days of the union getting the 50% check-offs needed. Then if no agreement is reached between the company and the union within 120 days, the government provides an arbitrator who will dictate the wages and benefits the company will provide the workers for a two-year contract. Given that the Labor Department will designate the arbitrator and given its generally pro-labor union stance, you can see why labor unions have written these provisions into the bill.

Meanwhile, a February 2007 McLaughlin Associates poll of 1000 respondents found that 79% opposed this bill and only 14% were in for it. Among just Democrats, 78% opposed the bill and 16% were for it. A 2004 Zogby poll found that 78% of union workers oppose any measure that denies them a secret ballot vote on union representation. Despite this opposition by voters, the Democrat Party obligation to the labor unions is so great that the Employee Free Choice Act, or abomination, may well pass Congress when it is considered soon. President Obama voted for it when it failed to pass the Senate last time and swore during the election that he would sign it into law as President.

Soon not only GM and U.S. Steel will be having difficulties being competitive, but your corner independently owned gas station and the local diner will be struggling even harder than normally to stay in business. Small business owners who relished doing it their way instead of opting for the safety and easier life of working for a large company, will find themselves slaves to a labor union. What a life!

Unions to Destroy Entrepreneur's Creations

Labor unions have been having a hard time in the private sector in the United States. Only 7.5% of private sector workers are union members. In the 1980s, union membership was about 20% of the private workforce. The unions are desperate to reverse this trend. They spent $450 million electing more Congressmen in this last election in an effort to get changes in the laws to help them unionize more and smaller businesses.

Unions are a major factor in making unionized companies less competitive. Unionized workers are paid in accordance with seniority, not with respect to productivity. In many other ways, unions make companies less competitive. Promotion by seniority saps the incentive to work hard and to think on the job. Work rules may cause a great loss of multi-functionality in employees and may simply have them taking unnecessary breaks. Union-imposed rules may make little sense in many contexts, but management cannot bend them to accommodate the Big Picture or the complete, rationally evaluated context of a particular situation. Unions also push for wage and benefit increases which many companies cannot sustain. Consequently, unionized businesses are a vanishing bred of business in the highly competitive American marketplace. With global markets more and more competitive also, unions are more and more a disaster for many businesses and for their employees.

The premier legislation that unions are seeking to reverse their loss of private sector membership is card checks. They and their Congressional allies are calling this The Employee Free Choice Act. This is really legislation designed to keep employers from ever speaking to their employees before their companies are unionized. It is also designed to make it easy for the union organizers to intimidate workers wherever they wish to corner them to get them to check a card that they are interested in being represented by the union. It is very revealing that union members do not like card check. They want union representation to be chosen by secret ballot. In union households, 69% oppose The Employee Free Choice Act! 76% of union voters say that the secret ballot is the best way to determine if workers want to be unionized or not.

Entrepreneurs create most of the jobs in America. In particular, small businesses create most of these jobs. The owners of these small businesses face a very daunting task in trying to build and maintain a business. Of the businesses started in 1992, 25% died in the first year. 50% were gone in 4 years. In the 10th year only 29% were still in existence. Yet, most of the owners of these businesses worked incredible long hours and did their best to try to make their companies a success. Most of these companies died even without the added burden of being unionized.

A great many small business owners went into business in good part because they had had it with working for others. Many of them are independent-minded people who want to work their way. The unions want to boss them around when they have built a business just large enough for the unions to be able to milk it of some significant resources. With the take-over of more and more small businesses, the unions will try to build up their membership. This will then give the unions more income they can use to try to bribe the politicians into giving them ever more power. The union bosses will be able to live high on the hog in money and power, while ever more small businesses are ground into oblivion.

This is a huge attack on wealth and property in America. It is a serious threat to small businesses and the huge investment that most small businessmen have put into those businesses. It is an overt expropriation of wealth. It is also an attack upon innovation and the determined spirits who have created wealth out of nothing with years dedicated, focused effort. Since the secret ballot is the most accurate way to determine whether the employees of a company want to be unionized, it is also an attack upon their livelihoods. Many of them do have long time horizons and want to work for a company that will exist in 10 years. Many employees do not want to see their union dues given to politicians they do not even want to vote for, let alone fund. This activity by the labor unions is hugely immoral and should be very roundly condemned by everyone.

A worker has a right to choose to be represented by a union. An employer has the right to then fire him rather than to have to negotiate with a labor union representative. Both employees and employers have the right to make choices. But, ultimately, an employee has his job at the discretion of the employer. If the employee does not wish to meet the conditions of employment of the employer, then the employee may leave and find another employer or he may start his own business. No employer is responsible against his will for the employment of anyone. To the degree that the law claims he is and forces him to provide jobs, the employer is simply a slave of the state and of the employee. There is no reason any employer should put up with this injustice. No one should be a slave, most especially not because he is productive and innovative enough to create jobs for others.

Obama Attacks Selfishness Again and Again

This guy is really committed to attacking people for being selfish. He attacks them if they use their own mind and work long, hard hours to create income and wealth by providing goods and services that other people want and voluntarily trade for. Frankly, to do so is to attack the mind and body of every individual human being. He believes it is perfectly righteous to threaten each of us with brutal force to deprive us of the value of the hours of our lives and to dictate to us what our values will be, or else, he will soon be able to send hordes of government-hired goons to forcefully take our property and take our income. All in the name of his supposition that if we do not allow this to happen, we are the damned selfish.

Well, I am selfish and proud that I am worthy of living a fine life. I am competent and fully able to manage my own life, while directing the thought and action needed to identify my values and to achieve them. I am proudly selfish and have a sovereign right to live for my values, not Obama's values and not for some amorphous goo of the values of those who voted for him. We have a choice: to be selfish or to be slaves.