How to Change a Society from a Largely Free Democratic Republic to a Fascist Socialist Totalitarian State

1.  Divide individuals by gender, by ethnicity, by wealth and income, by education, by age, and by sexuality; 

2.  Pit one group against another using the force of government to provide unearned rewards to some at the expense of others by putting limits on the rights of individuals to earn a living, limiting their freedom of association, and their freedom to cooperate with one another; 

3.  Thereby, creating distrust and hatred as the factions fight to control the government that insists on hurting many, making it a threat to all, thereby making it a matter of life and death for each group to control the government;

4.  Watch a country that once honored merit in the market place, but became an unlimited democracy, succumb to greed for the unearned with the development of ever more special interest groups dependent upon government largess;

5.  The government-run and funded education system becomes a tool promoting more and more government powers, seeks to suppress all private education alternatives, seeks to suppress individual rights especially freedom of speech and the freedom of the press or media, promotes the collective rights of some groups at the expense of the rights of the individuals in other groups, and promotes versions of the country's prior history that diverge ever more from the truth such that more and more power and money flow to the government and the education system;

6. In which a majority coalition of those who have less wealth and want government forced transfers of wealth to themselves and those who most lust for power turn the country into a socialist, fascist country (very poor, primitive countries usually turn communist instead);

7. Which in turn comes to be ruled by the most brutal elements of the power lusters with a total loss of individual rights.

I read William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich the summer after the 9th grade and came to understand most of this.  I think I understood some of these lessons better than Shirer did.  There have been many further examples of this process since WWII.

Here is a very interesting analysis video of what we are presently facing based on a young woman's experience during the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

No end in sight for the biofuel wars by Paul Driessen

Biofuels are unsustainable in every way, but still demand – and get – preferential treatment

The Big Oil-Big Biofuel wars rage on. From my perch, ethanol, biodiesel and “advanced biofuels” make about zero energy, economic or environmental sense. They make little political sense either, until you recognize that politics is largely driven by crony-capitalism, campaign contributions and vote hustling.

Even now, once again, as you read this, White House, EPA, Energy, Agriculture and corporate factions are battling it out, trying to get President Trump to sign off on their preferred “compromise” – over how much ethanol must be blended into gasoline, how many small refiners should be exempted, et cetera.

This all got started in the 1970s, when publicly spirited citizens persuaded Congress that “growing our own energy” would safeguard the USA against oil embargoes and price gouging by OPEC and other unfriendly nations, especially as our own petroleum reserves rapidly dwindled into oblivion. Congress then instituted the Renewable Fuels Standard in 2005, when the Iraq War triggered renewed fears of global oil supply disruptions. The RFS requires that almost all gasoline sold in the USA must contain 10% ethanol – which gets a third fewer miles per gallon than gasoline and damages small engines.

But, we were told, these fuels are renewable, sustainable, a way to prevent “dangerous climate change.”

It’s all bunk. In recent years, the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) revolution has given America and the world at least a century of new oil and natural gas reserves. America has become the world’s largest oil and gas producer and within five years could be producing far more oil and gas than any other country in the world. Terminals built years ago to import fuel from distant lands are being reconfigured to export abundant US oil, liquefied natural gas and refined products to distant lands.

Average global temperatures – as actually measured by satellites and weather balloons – are now almost a full degree Fahrenheit lower than predicted by climate models (the average of 102 IPCC computer model forecasts) that also foretell the daily litany of climate and weather cataclysms. However, hurricanes are less frequent and intense than a half-century ago, and Harvey was the first Category 3-5 hurricane to make US landfall in a record 12 years. Violent F4-5 tornadoes have also been less frequent over the past 34 years than during the 35 years before that, and not one F4-5 tornado hit the USA in 2018.

Over their full life cycle (from planting, growing and harvesting crops, to converting them to fuel, to transporting them by truck or rail car, to blending and burning them), biofuels emit just as much (plant-fertilizing) carbon dioxide as oil-based gasoline and diesel. Those biofuels also require enormous amounts of land, water, fertilizer, insecticides and energy. None of this is renewable or sustainable.

In fact, corn turned into E85 fuel (85% ethanol/15% gasoline) and grown where rainfall is insufficient requires irrigation – and up to 28 gallons of water from rivers or groundwater supplies per mile traveled!

US ethanol production utilizes 38% of America’s corn and 27% of its sorghum – grown on cropland the size of Iowa: 36 million acres, much of which would otherwise be wildlife habitat. And the fertilizers used to grow those crops, especially the corn, result in nutrient-rich runoff that increases nitrogen levels in the Gulf of Mexico, causing deadly algal blooms. When the algae die and decompose, they create low and no-oxygen zones the size of Delaware – killing marine life that can’t swim away quickly enough.

In short, biofuels have huge downsides and do nothing to address the scary scenarios that have either shriveled amid the winds of history – or were wildly exaggerated or imaginary to begin with.

But once these biofuel programs were launched, they became permanent. They created a biofuel industry that wants to get bigger every year, and supports politicians who want to get reelected year after year. That brings us back to the Executive Branch biofuel battles – and to issues that I myself struggle to comprehend, amid the morass of acronyms and conflicting policies and mandates.

Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency require that refiners blend “conventional biofuel” (mostly ethanol) into gasoline – and also meet various “advanced biofuel” and biomass-based diesel requirements. However, too much ethanol in gasoline damages engines in older cars, generators, garden equipment and boats; that puts a limit on how much ethanol can actually go in the fuel supply (the “blend wall”). As a result, while ethanol blending continues to increase gradually, American motorists have never been able to consume enough ethanol to satisfy applicable Renewable Fuel Standards.

However, biofuel interests want the government to keep mandating even more ethanol – a desire that faces multiple problems. Gasoline demand is decreasing, as people drive less, in more fuel-efficient cars, and in electric and hybrid vehicles (that are heavily subsidized under other laws).

Tariff wars with China and other countries have hurt corn and sorghum farmers, who want to be “compensated” via more biofuel mandates under the Renewable Fuels Standard – even though beef, pork and poultry farmers get hurt by higher grain prices resulting from so much corn devoted to ethanol.

Declining fuel demand and the blend wall mean refiners cannot mix all the mandated 15 billion annual gallons of ethanol into gasoline. They are thus forced to over-comply with the “advanced biofuel” part of the RFS mandate by buying expensive foreign biodiesel and “renewable” diesel. Refiners that do not control the point where biofuel can be blended into gasoline (eg, large distribution terminals or local gas stations) must buy “credits” called Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) that show (or pretend to show)  the required (foreign) biofuels were mixed with the gasoline they make domestically.

This all gets really expensive, really fast, which is why the law allows exemptions to small refiners that  face “disproportionate economic hardship” from costs that have gotten so high that courts have ordered the EPA to grant more “small refinery exemptions” (SREs) – waivers from the RFS mandates.

However, biofuel has been blended into the fuel small refiners make anyway. This situation resulted in ample supplies of RFS compliance credits, and RIN prices have dropped from over 90 cents apiece to 12 or 20 cents over the past two years or even lower at times. Of course, this all angered the biofuel lobby, which has attacked the Administration for issuing SREs, falsely claiming the exemptions are   “destroying demand” for biofuel and “hurting American farmers.” 

They levied these attacks on EPA, despite the fact that the Trump Administration granted the biofuel industry its biggest request in 20 years: an air quality waiver that allows E15 to be sold year round. So some in the Administration have proposed to “reallocate lost biofuel gallons” the biofuel industry says were caused by SREs. But there’s nothing to reallocate, since ethanol is being blended despite the SREs.

The reallocation proposal thus has the practical effect of increasing the biofuel mandate by over 700 million gallons above the 15-billion-gallon statutory ceiling on ethanol. That brings us back to the fact that America is not producing enough advanced biofuels, biodiesel or renewable diesel. That means refiners have to buy more foreign supplies of these fuels, from Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, et cetera.

Of course, that does nothing to help American farmers. It just turns the Renewable Fuel Standard into a big foreign biofuel mandate. It also means President Trump is caught between trying to placate two of his core constituencies: farmers, primarily in the Midwest, and the oil and refining industry with all its jobs.

This is mind-numbingly complicated. But the bottom line is pretty simple: Every time Congress gets involved in trying to fix complex energy and economic problems – instead of letting free market industries and innovators sort things out – it creates a legislative, regulatory, legal and lobbying mess. Every attempted additional fix makes things worse. And trying to justify all the meddling, by claiming we’re running out of oil or face manmade climate cataclysms, just makes things worse.

We should end this crazy-quilt biofuel program. But anyone who thinks that will happen in Washington, DC or Des Moines, Iowa is smoking that stuff that’s now legal and widespread in Boulder, Colorado. But President Trump and his EPA should at least reduce – and certainly not increase – any biofuel quotas.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy and environmental policy.

Charles' Comments:

Crony-capitalism is a self-contradiction.  The correct term is mercantilism, the common practice of kings and the aristocracy who granted special business privileges and monopolies to friends and supporters since ancient times.  We still are governed by an aristocracy, though their titles have changed from king, baron, earl, and count to President, Senator, Representative, and about a million bureaucrat titles.  The aristocracy still believes that force makes right and they know the needs and what the aspirations should be of the serfs / deplorables better than they do.

Washington, DC is a swamp predominantly controlled by predatory special interests who feed on the vast majority of Americans.  When anyone threatens their control, a vast coalition of usually disparate groups arises to oppose that threat, though in normal times these groups behave more like hyenas fighting over a carcass -- the stolen fruits of production of the American people.  We see a great example of that in the effort to remove Trump from office by many denizens in the bowels of our thieving government even before he took the oath of office.

A recent study by researchers at the University of Minnesota, says that the production of a gallon of ethanol from corn takes anywhere from 5 to 2,138 gallons of water, depending on the irrigation needs of the area in the United States where the corn is grown.  As the amount of corn dedicated to ethanol production has grown, the amount of land dedicated to corn planting has increased.  That increase has required that land less and less suitable to corn production be used.  When ethanol production was doubled between 2005 and 2008, the amount of water used in ethanol from corn production more than tripled.  The proposal to make 15% ethanol in gasoline the requirement will cause a further increase in corn production for ethanol and still more water use.  In many areas of the U.S. water aquifers have been depleted at alarming rates as it is.  The huge Ogallala aquifer stretching from South Dakota to Texas is a particularly important and very stressed aquifer.

What Do Freedom-Loving People Do When Government Comes to Take Your Arms

On 19 April 1775, the British army entered Lexington, Massachusetts on its way to Concord, Massachusetts to take weapons and rounds from the militia which Great Britain had come to fear.  The Americans were determined to prevent the loss of their ability to defend themselves.  The result that day was the battles of Lexington, Concord, and the severe punishment of the British troops as they retreated back to Boston.

Most of the people of Massachusetts outside of Boston were previously in a state of rebellion in that the Americans were no longer obeying many of the commands of the government of Great Britain.  The people had had enough of a legislature passing laws that did not have their interests in mind and that did not act to protect the exercise of their individual rights.  The British Parliament had too often restricted the means of Americans in earning their living in favor of businesses in Great Britain.  Great Britain was too ready to tax Americans, often claiming that Americans needed to pay more for British armed forces protections, which the Americans actually found highly wanting.  Great Britain was also acting to prevent Americans from owning huge areas of the continent.

Today, the federal government of the United States of America fails to protect the individual rights of Americans also.  Our Congress daily shows its contempt for the interests of most of the American people.  Our government too often tramples upon our efforts to exercise our individual rights.  The federal government restricts our ability to earn a living in many ways, with a great deal of help in doing this from state and local governments.  The governments too often grant privileges at the expense of the People to special interests such as labor unions, green energy companies, large financial institutions, excessively complex laws necessitating the hiring of highly paid lawyers and accountants, favoritism of educators, the fostering of hordes of bureaucrats who eat out the substance of the land, and huge grants to dishonest environmentalists and global warming alarmist scientists.  The federal government holds ownership of a huge fraction of the land area of the USA, preventing private ownership and its use in productive enterprises.  And the Democrat Socialist Party is an enthusiastic advocate of draconian gun controls and the confiscation of any significant weapon capability on the part of the People.

Few Americans today would stand up to their government if it were to come to Lexington and Concord or anywhere else in the USA and demand that they give up their weapons.  It is an amazing thing that 244 years ago, Americans had the strength of their convictions to stand up to the mighty army and navy of Great Britain and buy us a couple of hundred years of comparative freedom.  It is important to remember those brave and hardy freedom-loving men on this important anniversary.

President Thomas Jefferson Slashed Government Spending -- We Need a Jeffersonian Slasher

I am reading Six Frigates -- The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy by Ian W. Toll.  After the War of Independence, the United States had no navy until the Quasi War with the French under the John Adams administration caused the government to re-establish the U.S. Navy.  In the Quasi War with the French, the revolutionary government in France was raiding American ships at sea and confiscating them and their cargoes.  The French were trying to do this on the sly, because the Americans traded with their enemies, especially Great Britain.  This confiscation of American ships was a rather profitable business for French privateers and even the French navy.

Congress authorized the building of six naval frigates of a size larger than those of the common British plan for naval frigates.  Four were to be 44-gun frigates and two were 36-gun frigates.  This was viewed as a very expensive venture, but shipping losses at sea were very high.  Not only were the French preying on the thousands of American ships involved in international trade, but so were the Barbary Pirates of Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco.  These original U.S. Navy frigates were the United States, President, Congress, Constitution, Constellation, and Chesapeake.  The USS Constellation fought and captured the French frigate L'Insurgente in the Caribbean on 9 February 1799 which had earlier captured American ships.  Napoleon took over the French government in a coup and decided to end the conflict with the United States shortly before Jefferson became President in 1801.  Jefferson would very soon find it necessary to deal with the Barbary Pirates.

While this is interesting history, especially for me since my father was a career naval officer, this paragraph about Jefferson's commitment to frugal and limited government caught my attention:

In his first inaugural, Jefferson promised "a wise and frugal Government, which ... shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."  In private letters, he made the point more sharply: the Republicans would "reform the waste of public money, and thus drive away the vultures who prey on it."  Using presidential authority whenever congressional authorization was not needed, Jefferson and his cabinet simply dismissed federal officeholders they considered superfluous.  The State Department closed all foreign embassies except those in Madrid, Paris, and London.  The Treasury Department's internal revenue inspectors were fired en masse.  "We are hunting out and abolishing multitudes of useless offices," Jefferson told his son-in-law in June; "striking off jobs, etc., etc."  The magnitude of federal waste they were finding, he told James Monroe, was even greater than the Republicans had expected: "agencies upon agencies in every part of the earth, and for the most useless or mischievous purposes, and all of these opening doors for fraud and embezzlement far beyond the ostensible profits of the agency.  These are things of the existence of which no man dreamt, and we are lopping them down silently to make as little noise as possible."

Firing government employees en masse, driving away vultures by spending less, abolishing whole useless offices and agencies dedicated to useless or mischievous purposes with doors open to fraud and embezzlement, and lopping them down silently were Jefferson's purpose to provide a wise and frugal government.  Yet today, we are faced with such problems of overblown government as would surely cause Jefferson apoplexy.  We very much need a President with a Jeffersonian commitment to wise and frugal government.  But anyone with but a fraction of such a commitment today is considered far to radical, an extremist of the right, no matter how wise such a commitment to frugal and limited government is and no matter how federal spending lures special interests to mischievous purposes and fraudulent claims of public benefit.

The Cash for Clunker Politicians Program

John Sarbanes, Democrat Representative in the House of the incredibly gerrymandered 3rd Congressional District of Maryland, is sponsoring a new bill to provide oodles of cash for politicians.  The idea is to pose this as a way to give small campaign donors more say-so in Washington.  Small campaign donations would become tax-deductions and would be matched by money taken from the general taxpayer.  That some taxpayers will not want to fund a given politician is to be ignored and removed from his control.  The proposed Democrat plan is a Cash for Clunkers program for politicians.  We should call it Cash for Clunker Politicians.

This ignores the real problem that a too big and too powerful government takes too many actions few voters have the time to study.  They cannot figure out the consequences of the myriad effects on the People.  The People know government is too big and is often harmful, but they do not know what to do about it.  Indeed, they are very susceptible to being deceived and misdirected by politicians who regard it as their full-time occupation to become Master Manipulators of the disdained People.  The recent history of the Obama Administration and the Democrat Progressive Elitist members of Congress has made this picture of politicians especially clear.  As they proclaimed a new era of transparency, public documents have become massively less available to the public and insanely subject to being "lost."  It has become ever more obvious that the leadership of the Democratic Party has little but contempt for the People and is completely enamored with the Big Lie concept.

The People, being highly befuddled by massive government and the many highly deceptive politicians, tend not to vote because the responsibility has become too much of a time burden, too much of an intellectual effort, and too odious emotionally for them.  Since most citizens do not vote consequently and most of those who do vote do not understand what the government is doing, a huge power vacuum results.  Politicians such as Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Cardin, and Sarbanes take full advantage of this to institute new laws designed to pay off special interests and to provide them with a very lucrative job as power brokers.  They use that power to extort money from legitimate businesses which are the generators of wealth.  In turn, business money and the money of the many special interests who are not businesses, has to be distributed to politicians to either keep them from doing harm to those businesses and other special interests or to curry their powerful favor.  That this is the necessary result should be obvious to anyone, but apparently is not.

Sarbanes, son of Senator Sarbanes who saddled the People with the very deleterious Sarbanes-Oxley Law that has greatly reduced business productivity, is a sponsor of H.R. 20, the Government By the People Act.  This proposed law is just to create still another pot of money for politicians to use to increase their power and to fertilize the growth of still Bigger Government.  But note the as-usual deceptive title of the bill.

The only way to solve the problem of special interest control of government is to drastically reduce the power and scope of government so that it can be better understood by the People and so it will have much less potential to harm or favor special interests.  Any other solution is nothing but a deception.  Note also that the matching of deductible campaign contributions out of paid taxes is a violation of the freedom of conscience and freedom of speech of individual taxpayers.  A taxpayer should not have to fund the election campaigns of politicians he opposes.

It is informative to understand how Rep. John Sarbanes sets up this deception.  Here is his letter so you can read it yourself:

Dear Friend,

In today's political environment – where wealthy and well-connected special interests spend billions of dollars on elections and wield considerable influence in Washington – it's no wonder why Marylanders and others across the nation are fed up with government and turning away from the polls.

And who can blame folks for their cynicism? It's a perfectly rational reaction to the influence of big money on elections and on the governing machinery in Washington.

As you may know, the 2014 election set two disturbing records: more than $4 billion spent and the lowest turnout since the midterm elections of 1942. While there's no definitive proof of a causal relationship between these two trends, it's worth exploring.

For the average citizen, the most important motivation for casting a vote is the belief that, when your candidate arrives in Washington, he or she will govern in a way that represents your interest.

Unfortunately, Big Money is making a mockery of that motivation. Because deep-pocketed special interests are funding these campaigns, they are the ones calling the shots in Washington, and your interest – the public interest – gets left behind.

Still, there is reason for hope.

Most people who run for public office do so out of a sincere desire to help others and to make a difference in their community. Many are deeply frustrated by the outsized role of money in politics and long to restore Congress' credibility with the public. It's time for lawmakers to consider reforms that address the influence of big money and give everyday citizens a real voice in their government.

One path – putting limits on campaign expenditures – has been effectively blocked by the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United and the difficult challenge of passing a constitutional amendment to repeal that decision. But there is another way to address big money's influence: set up a competing small-donor system focused on everyday citizens.

For example, a tax credit for small-donor political contributions would give more Americans the means to participate in the funding of campaigns. Boost those donations with matching funds, and candidates will begin to search out small donors instead of going to the PACs and the big-money crowd.

Imagine a Member of Congress standing in your living room listening to your voice because you have the power to fund his or her campaign. That's the promise of a small-donor matching system. And that's also why I've introduced H.R. 20, the Government By the People Act – to empower everyday citizens and to amplify their voices in Congress.

Big money might have won this election, but there's still hope that we can take back our democracy. It won't be without a fight.

To learn more about what you can do to fight big money in politics, visit: http://ofby.us/citizen-cosponsor/.
                                            

Sincerely,


John P. Sarbanes

As I hope you can see, he does acknowledge aspects of the problem, but then proposes a solution that is no solution and will only make matters worse.  But all the while he poses as your friend.  He is anything but that.  He is a typical power-hungry Progressive Elitist who believes you are too stupid to choose your own values and manage your own life in a vibrant private sector.  No, you should be made dependent upon Big Government so it can protect you from Special Interests in his deceptive viewpoint.  What he neglects to say is that it is Big Government that is the machine that Special Interests use to control the People to their advantage and to do great harm to the People.  The idea that simply choosing better politicians and better managers for the Big Government will make the subsequent Big Government the friend of the People is simply insane.  It is a doomed attempt to reverse Cause and Effect.

The Framers of the Constitution understood the problem of Big Government and Special Interests and attempted to set up a mandate for a highly limited government of few enumerated powers so such problems would be minimized.  Because we have allowed the size and scope of government to exceed these limits at the national level and corresponding limits in most local governments, we have rule by massive and Special Interest-controlled governments.  We should always be wary of the fact that one of those Special Interests is politicians.  Our huge governments are not Government by the People anymore, but Government by the Politicians.  This Sarbanes Cash for Clunker Politicians bill is another slush fund for those Politicians.

The Patient Subjugation and Unaffordable Care Act and Progressive Elitism

As the time nears when Americans are once again being forced to sign-up for government approved health insurance plans, a string of pithy quotes by Jonathan Gruber, a chief contributor to the creation of the near-secret PPACA bill, baldly state that stupid Americans were easily manipulated into subjugating themselves to this law.  In fact most Americans have always opposed this law and very many were always angry that the Congress did not construct a bill of such a critical nature with due deliberation and discussion.  It did not even read the bill, as famously noted by Nancy Pelosi with her statement that the bill had to be passed so that it might be read!  It is true that Americans had been duped into providing the Democrat Socialist Party the presidency, a super majority in the Senate, and a majority in the House of Representatives.

All one had to know about the bill to oppose it was that individuals were no longer to be free to choose what medical care would be covered in their health insurance plans.  With some thought, some even realized that the basis for a government claim for the authority to dictate how an individual would maintain his mind and body, was a highly collectivist claim that government had a right of ownership in every individual's mind and body.  This is an appalling claim to anyone who understands and values the equal, sovereign right of every individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own mind, body, and labor, and to the pursuit of one's own happiness.  The government's denial of individual self-ownership is chilling and brutal.  This denial was a chief aim of the many Progressive Elitists in leadership positions in the Democrat Party, in academia, and in much of the media.

In the cause of achieving this universal claim of collective ownership of every individual's mind and body, the Progressive Elitists are highly united.  They often agree that lying, misdirection, bribery, and fraudulent voting are all very acceptable means to achieve the end of collectivism which they value above all else.

Progressive Elitists often state that everyone is morally obliged to sacrifice their own interest for, as they like to say, "the least among us."  This is not only a moral claim in their minds, but it is a license for the use of government force to make everyone give up their own interest in favor of someone the Progressive Elitist believes to be in need, either materially or mentally.  This claim of subjugation to the needs of "the least among us" has become more and more common on the part of Progressive Elitists.

There is a tradition and still a strong following among Progressive Elitists for the notion that government is the moral enforcer of the so-called pragmatist claim that the greatest good for the greatest number defines morality.  When real moral principles are deemed too hard to formulate, to defend, and to live by, such a weak nostrum is about all a society can fall back on, excepting religion and the commonly related divine right of Kings and their aristocratic and ecclesiastic enablers.  To be sure, the American Progressive Elitist does view the President as a King-like figure and themselves as the aristocratic and ecclesiastic enablers.

They also claim to be proponents of democracy, though that claim is modulated by their constant belief that most Americans are stupid, as was so clearly revealed in the Jonathan Gruber and Nancy Pelosi comments.  This was earlier revealed in Obama's claim that most Americans cling foolishly to their guns and religion.  That he also sees himself as a king is very apparent in his saying as President he can do anything he wants and in his continuing violations of the Rule of Law.

Progressive Elitists are in a bind given that they purport to support democracy, yet they think the People are mostly incapable of choosing their own values, managing their own lives, and of voting correctly as envisioned by the Progressive Elitists.  They must find a way to manipulate the unwashed masses to vote in a manner that will allow the Progressive Elitists to actually dominate and control the government.  Because the Progressive Elitist is sure that she knows what is best for the masses, deception through any combination of lies and misdirections is justified.  We have seen this in spades with the PSUCA (see title) or the Patient SuckA.

How do the Progressive Elitists enlist support from the People in democratic elections?  Usually it is by claiming that they are for all the People except the Rich or that they are the champions of the Middle Class.  In this way they are hoping to gain the support of the majority and they will commonly promise this majority enough special favors to try to win them to their cause.

Among their many deceptions is the idea that it is possible to achieve the greater good of the greater number through laws that affect many of our moral choices.  Perhaps it is the in-supportability of this idea that has actually pushed more and more Progressive Elitists toward the claim that government is obliged to primarily pursue the interests of "the least among us," though this claim is usually made to fellow highly educated people they expect to be fellow elitists.  The practical problem of achieving political power is complicated if the Progressive Elitists actually ask the Middle Class to give up its own interests.  This is not an easy sell.

Why is this notion of the greatest good for the greatest number unachievable?  If force is to be used to transfer some value from some to others and yet a majority has to be enlisted to support that use of force by the government, then it is not easy to have a big enough pool of victims from whom enough can be extracted to provide a noticeable benefit to the majority except when the majority is not much greater than the victimized minority.  So, on one issue the beneficiaries might be 60%, on another 55%, and on another they may be 80%.  If the beneficiaries are randomly chosen, the chance any one individual was benefited on all three issues is only 0.264.

If these same issues were left to the private sector, most people might very easily arrange their affairs to benefit on each of the three issues or at least not to be hurt on any of them.  Surely on all of the issues before our Big Government now, a transfer to the private sector would commonly allow individuals to achieve 70 to 90% of their values.  In the private sector one has the added critical advantage that force cannot be used to make you enter into a trade that you do not think is in your own best interest.  In the government sector a victim is required and force must be threatened to make the victim yield his time, his income, or his wealth up to the Progressive Elitist re-distributor.

Now to be sure, the Progressive Elitist program does not aim to distribute the benefits randomly.  Some people are supposed to be the ones who are commonly to bear the hurt, in theory.  In practice, Big Government is little more controlled by the Progressive Elitists avowed agenda than it is a true expression of the democratic will of the majority of the People.  As I have noted over and over, Big Government is so vast and complex that the People do not understand what is going on and they commonly feel powerless to control it.  Even few, if any, Progressive Elitists can understand and follow the full scope of government actions.  This was richly illustrated in their contingent of full-time politicians voting for the PSUCA without reading it and later having to admit that they knew little about it.

Progressive Elitists who are not actually corrupt are also overcome by those who are corrupt and a multitude of special interests who fill the power vacuum to manipulate some government policies of particular interest to themselves.  Big Government becomes mostly a government not of and for the People, but one of and for the Special Interests.  Contrary to the claims of the Progressive Elitists, this is not correctable by electing or appointing better Progressive Elitist managers.  Indeed, the Progressive Elitists who see themselves as managing government actually have to turn to Special Interests for help in writing the laws which control actions in the private sector they do not themselves understand.  This happens all the time.  Some Special Interests are happy to do this for them so that they can design a law that gives them special favors or at least costs smaller companies, their future competitors, more to abide by than it costs them.  Complex laws and regulations tend to suppress smaller, hungrier competitors very well.

ObamaCare certainly has rewarded many special interests while depriving many individuals of the health insurance plan they wanted, the doctor they wanted, the convenience of using a hospital near them, and the weight of often much more expensive plans especially if a young male, but also for anyone who was healthy.  The AARP was among the heavily rewarded special interests, as were some other insurers.  So were many hospitals since many doctors had to give up their private practices and join hospital and clinic groups due to the computer records and financial pressures of ObamaCare.

Government can be designed so that it only acts in all of our interests.  There is only one way this can be achieved.  Government must be allowed only the power to protect the one value we all share.  That value is our individual rights.  This was recognized in our great Declaration of Independence.  A government so limited in power and scope was mandated by the People in our Constitution.  Unfortunately, the Progressive Elitist program has long required the effective destruction of the protections of our Constitution, for as Obama famously stated it is a roadblock to the redistribution of wealth and favors.  The Constitution stood in the way of his Progressive Elitist transformation of America.  Now the Obama Regime simply ignores it and any law they do not like.

Because the Progressive Elitist government model cannot improve the lives of the majority of Americans compared to their own self-management in the private sector, the Progressive Elitist has to have constant recourse to lies and misdirections.  The Middle Class must be deceived.  It is simply impossible to actually benefit "the least among us,", the Middle Class, and the necessary number of Special Interests.  It is an absolute certainty that most Americans will suffer from the Progressive Elitist Big Government model.

The only way we can ever bring back a commitment to constitutional and limited government consistent with our individual freedom is to live by an individualist philosophy designed to promote rational values consistent with the practical needs of life on Earth.  Objectivism is that philosophy.  A commitment to its principles would enable the People of the USA to elect officials capable of and dedicated to reforming our horribly errant governments.  We must transform these tyrannical governments too much under the control of the Progressive Elitists and their allied Special Interests.

Those special interests are not just rich people, corporations, and religious people as the Progressive Elitists claim.  Some special interests are rich people or corporations, but there are many more.  These include:

• Christians who would use government to impose their values, commonly by requiring women to carry a fetus to full term, by denying same-sex marriages, or by claiming that Christian charity requires governmental redistribution.  Yes, some Christians are Elitists, some Progressive, some Traditional
• Islamists who want to impose Sharia Law.
• Environmentalists who believe man is evil, but all other animals are supreme.
• Those opposed to carbon-based fuels for environmental and CAGW reasons.
• Those who believe that profit is evil.
• Labor unions who deny individuals freedom of labor contract.
• Government workers
• Green energy companies with subsidies and favoring mandates
• Farmers with subsidies
• Those who benefit from the ethanol mandate.
• Users of the Export-Import Bank
• Those companies protected by high tariffs
• Banks with cheap money from the Federal Reserve
• Too-Big-To-Fail financial institutions
• Too-Big-To-Fail auto companies
• Extended unemployment beneficiaries
• Disability insurance recipients who used to work with the same disability
• Food Stamp recipients
• Employees whose employers are forced to do all the tax paperwork with its risks
• Professions and jobs with limited competition due to licensing requirements
• Accountants and tax attorneys due to the overly complex tax law
• Trial lawyers
• Insurers due to excessive liability awards allowing them to collect high premiums
• AARP with its health insurance supplements and anti-youth political program
• Home builders and mortgage lenders due to mortgage interest deductions
• Beneficiaries of rent controls
• Older home owners in areas with severe home-building restrictions
• Existing commercial real estate owners where new commercial construction is denied
• TV and radio stations favored by the FCC
• Those near shale oil and gas formations with super cheap energy because governments are delaying pipeline construction
• Russia and the Saudis because governments are slowing energy production here
• Many, many more

The Progressive Elitist does not think we are capable of arranging and choosing our own health insurance, just as they do not think we can generally choose our values and manage our own lives.  As Tocqueville said:

A man’s admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.

It is interesting to note that that contempt seems to easily transform into a disregard for the welfare of your fellow man and makes it easier to take advantage of him as a Special Interest manipulating the powers of excessive government.  The transformation of America implemented by the Obama Regime has richly illustrated this.

[On 26 November 2014, Prof. Walter E. Williams wrote a column called Elite Contempt for Ordinary Americans, which emphasizes the role of academics as a center of such contempt and their efforts to indoctrinate the young in college.]

Representative John Sarbanes Would Restrict Freedom of Speech

Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat, Maryland, is polling his constituents on their desires to limit the influence of Big Business on Big Government.  I am in his most incredibly gerrymandered district.  Here is his letter to me:

Dear Friend,

Many Americans feel their priorities get left behind in Washington and the priorities of billionaires and big corporations receive undue attention. Many tell me their voices are being drowned out by the special interests. I'd like to know how you feel about the role of big money in politics. Please share your thoughts with me in the survey below.

Do you believe big money politics is corrupting our government?

Yes No

Do you think everyday Americans deserve a way to fight back against special interest spending?

Yes No

Would you support a proposal to amplify the voices of everyday Americans in our elections

Yes No

Earlier this year, I introduced the Government by the People Act (HR 20) - a bipartisan bill with more than 140 cosponsors that would empower millions of everyday Americans to take back their government from big money special interests. To read more about the proposal and become a citizen cosponsor, pleas visit http://ofby.us
Sincerely,

John P. Sarbanes

I listened to John Sarbanes address the House on the bill he is sponsoring, along with many another Democrat in the House, and he only railed against Big Business.  He never mentioned any other type of special interest.  His bias is anti-business.  Of course he especially hit oil companies and made the many times debunked claim that they are heavily subsidized by government simply because they take the tax deductions provided to most businesses.  He had no complaints directed at the big political campaign donations of labor unions, trial lawyers, government employees, so-called green energy companies, teachers, and accountants who love complex tax codes.

The Sarbanes bill would provide everyone a tax credit for making a political donation, provide taxpayer's money to candidates based on how many people made donations to them, and provide additional money in the last 60 days of a campaign if some bureaucrat decides that a super PAC is slamming a candidate too hard in that time period.  So, let us see what this means:

• It now will cost a person nothing to aid the campaign of a candidate.  If it costs him nothing, he has even less reason to understand the candidate's purpose and the consequences of his political viewpoint.
• Hard-working, more productive people and corporations will have to provide funding for candidates who wish to use government force to redistribute their money to the many who pay little or no taxes through the taxpayer campaign financing requirement.  This enables such politicians to better buy the votes of those who pay little in taxes.
• Some bureaucrat, perhaps in the thrall of the President and his political party, will decide which candidates are being unfairly attacked by a big PAC and provide that candidate with taxpayer money.  I wonder if that will work any better than having the IRS decide who can set up a non-profit organization based on whether the organizational name has Patriot or Tea Party in the name or its purpose includes teaching the provisions of the Constitution?

 My response to him:

John,

As usual, your questions belie a bias based on a naive view of the role of government.

When government becomes big and dictates values to the People and starts micromanaging their lives, we all suffer for these quite obvious reasons:

• Government is too big for the elected officials to manage it well.
• The People cannot understand what the government is doing and all of the consequences of its actions.
• The People can no longer choose their representatives adequately.
• As the People lose control and understanding, they lose confidence in their government.
• Special interests step in to fill the power vacuum, manipulating just those policies that benefit themselves with no regard for the individual rights and welfare of most of the People.

The special interests include:

• Labor Unions
• Some Big Businesses
• Welfare Recipients
• Environmental Extremists and Global Warming Alarmists
• Trial Lawyers
• Government Employees including Teachers
  
• University Employees deriving income from Government Grants
• Exporters using Government Loans
• Banks using money printed by the Federal Reserve
• Ethanol Manufacturers and corn growers
• Some Farmers
• Shipping Line Operators
• PPACA Website Programmers
• Health Care Insurance Providers
• Really Bad American Car Manufacturers
• Power-Hungry Politicians
• Campaign Contributors to Power-Hungry Politicians
• Accountants due to Unintelligible Tax Laws Forcing Americans to Buy their Services
• Regulatory Consultants due to Unintelligible Regulations

No, John, you are not addressing the real problem.  The real problem is the Size of Government.  The one and only way to end the control of government by special interests is to reduce it to its very limited constitutional role of providing for the national defense, the post roads, and handing foreign affairs issues.  Then the national government will do much, much less harm to the People, be much better understood by them, and be much more capably managed by our Representatives.

Charles R. Anderson, Ph.D.
Lab: (410) 740-8562
Mobile: (301) 830-1886
http://www.AndersonMaterials.com
http://AndersonMaterials.blogspot.com
http://ObjectivistIndividualist.blogspot.com/

I do not suppose I will get any special interest favors from John Sarbanes!  I am surprised he is up to so much mischief in Congress.  One would think he would be spending all of his time traveling between the far-flung isthmuses of his kingly domain, the 3rd Congressional District of Maryland, shown here in brown:

Only Big Government could create and love such a creature.

A Democrat Wants to Know, Sort Of

A young Democrat of my acquaintance, who was educated as an engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology and has a Wharton School of Business MBA, sent me the following note:

Again the GOP strikes with the Govt shutdown. It all stinks of politics, and the unfortunately for the GOP, they are not very likeable right now, so the American people don't buy what they are selling. How childish was Cruz the other day?? If every politician threw a tantrum every time they didn't get what they wanted or believed in, where would we as a country be? 

Simple questions. Why is there no leadership in the GOP? Why is the Tea Party effectively blocking the everything? This GOP is frankly a shitshow (excuse my french), and there is no site in end. It is a shame, I am starting to think that an independent may have just as good a chance as the GOP in the next presidential elections, because almost everyone there is either useless, or has to flip flop numerous times just to get the party nomination (a la Romney - a good candidate). I know how you feel about the Affordable Care Act, but I don't think it is a bad idea to ask people to chip in when it is health related. America needs to go away from the "every man for himself" motto when it comes to basic fundamentals like health. The Affordable Care Act does not make America a socialist country.

Now despite this thinking, this young man is of considerable importance to me.  As a consequence, I have had several discussions with him, though as is usually the case when talking to a Democrat, there has been no change of his opinions despite my sterling reason!  There is always the sense that a Democrat simply lives in a different universe and all the laws of physics and economics are different there and they cannot imagine what those laws are on Earth.

Here is my reply:

When government spends 24 to 25% of the entire GDP and has a couple of hundred thousand pages of regulations that impose restrictions on the actions of individuals and many cost and time requirements on individuals in addition to its actual spending, then passions will run high on political issues.  And contrary to the pretense of those who believe wholeheartedly in Big Government, government is all about the use of force.  With our democratic pretense, we suppose that 50.1% of the voters have the right to use that force to make 49.9% do anything they please.  This is not the case.  It does make every government act of the legislature and of the President a matter of politics.

The purpose of legitimate government is to protect the rights of the individual.  These rights are very broad with respect to freedom of conscience, freedom of association, and the freedom to take all actions which support your own life and happiness without the use of force against others.  Those broad freedoms are only partially spelled out as a few particulars in the Bill of Rights.  The 9th Amendment which might protect the full scope of our individual rights is ignored and this is not surprising because too few people have thought out the complete scope of our individual rights.
 
The Constitution listed the few powers of the government and the list was short.  Had the government and many special interests not long fought to ignore the limits of that list, most individual rights would not be violated by the government.  In fact, many of the Framers of the Constitution made this very argument against a Bill of Rights, noting that a Bill of Rights would be too narrow a protection and just protect a portion of one's individual rights.  They argued that this would be taken as a reason to say the government can do anything to anyone which is not then denied by the Bill of Rights.  This is what has happened and then some.  Now even rights explicit in the Bill of Rights are violated, such as Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom to Assemble, Freedom to Petition the Government, and the right to own and bear arms.
 

Let us return to the problems of unfettered democracy with a big government.  This creates a society in which on issue after issue a slim majority (in the ideal case, in actuality, special interests very often control such a government and the beliefs of the people be damned) uses force to impose their will on a minority.  The minority is enraged both by having to do something they think is wrong and by the fact that they are forced to do it by force-wielding thugs, agents of the government.  There is the wrongness of the thing itself and there is the wrongness of the force itself.

Even if you are on the majority side in many cases, you will inevitably be on the minority side many times also.  This is an awful way to live life.  It is very stressful and very confrontational.  But, it is the nature of unfettered democracy and is a substantial part of the reason such democracies soon collapse.  They destroy the society and replace a natural tendency to cooperate with one another in the private sector with a mob or gang mentality striving to control the use of government force to their advantage.  They also make laws to cover many activities they simply do not understand.  This really gums up the works by removing the specialists in the private sector from the decision process.
 
If a minority and a number of special interests combine with a socialist President, they can even impose a monster system such as ObamaCare, despite most of the People opposing it.  Most of the things that big government does have some special interest group wanting it and most of the People are actually remarkably uninformed about it.  They are also generally victims of that action and do not understand that.

Big Government is all about every faction for itself.  It is not about the welfare of the People.  That is the pretense and it is very clear these days that it is a very hollow pretense.  Contrary to your statement, the private sector is not properly characterized as "every man for himself."  The private sector is characterized by people cooperating with one another for a multitude of purposes of their own choosing and helping one another to achieve the goals that each has chosen of his own free will.  The private sector, unlike the government sector, does not live by the use of force and does not allow some to impose their will on others.  It is the government sector that refuses to allow us to work out mutually agreeable contracts and associations with others in many, many ways.  The government limits our activities mostly in interactions with others and thereby forces us to go it alone in many cases where we would have sought out a mutually beneficial cooperative enterprise with others.

Such effects are very clear with such laws as the Minimum Wage Law.  If I wish to hire an under-educated and inexperienced young person and he wishes to take the job I may be able to give him, we are not allowed to negotiate any wage lower than the minimum wage.  I never get to evaluate his work ethic and ability to do productive work and he never gets to prove he can do the job and move on to a higher pay grade.  I have to go it without his potentially good production and he gets to turn to a life of crime.

Or take the fact that ObamaCare is forcing employers to stop hiring before they grow to 50 employees and it pushes them to reduce the hours worked in a week to fewer than 30 hours.  In effect, ObamaCare is forcing the employer to go it alone.  His ability to cooperate with others for their mutual benefit is restricted.  Then there are many, many medical providers who are now being laid off because their employers cannot make enough money to survive under ObamaCare.  Once again, Big Government is making people go it alone.

You say you do not think it is a bad idea to ask people to chip in to provide health care to others.  I do not much care whether you ask them to do so or not.  Go ahead and ask all you want, provided you are not being terribly dishonest and are not actually using force to make them contribute their hard-earned income to provide for the health of others.  But you are being dishonest here.  There is nothing that gives you the right to make others do this.  This is nothing but your particular wish.  Unfortunately, others wish that everyone had the same income.  Others wish that everyone has a nice home.  Others want everyone to eat well.  There is no end to what people wish with respect to others.  Imagine how awful a society would be if everyone got to use force to make everyone else live according to their wishes.

By and large, the Republican Party is for a slightly smaller government than is the Democrat Party.  To have a slightly smaller Big Government, such a party will often say no to the Party that is constantly proposing a new government program.  Some of the People actually want a substantially smaller government.  Many of these people are in the Tea Party movement, which I associate with myself.  They generally are Republicans, though not very happy Republicans.  Some are in the Libertarian Party.  But, naturally they are not going to join the party most enthusiastic about Big Government.  So, they have become a fractious element in the Republican Party.  They want that party to stand up for something closer to a constitutional government.  Naturally, they are opposed to most programs that would make the government still bigger and still more intrusive in our lives.

You bemoan the lack of Republican leaders holding the membership in an iron grip of control.  Well, what do you really expect of people who want to manage their own lives and choose their own values.  Those who want government to do this for them are naturally inclined to follow leaders.  Those who like to think independently and control their own decisions in life do not naturally turn to a leader to tell them what to do.  Traditionally, Americans never did, but after 100 years of growing Progressive Elitist effort and influence in the government-run or bribed schools, there are many people now well-conditioned to do as they are told.  I am of the old school and never allowed myself to be so conditioned.

The iron grip of control of the Democrat Party line is actually very exposed as it forces them to maintain beliefs obviously contrary to reality.  They still maintain that Americans will have better healthcare under ObamaCare at a lower cost and that enough medical care providers will be available.  This is clearly not going to be the case.  Many employers are dropping health insurance plans, many people will find that their doctor is no longer available, most people will find their costs will go up and that much of the cost provides them with care they do not want.  Many young people especially will not be able to get jobs because they would cost the employer more under ObamaCare than they used to.  It used to be that if you hired a young person, the average age in your insurance pool dropped so your health insurance cost went down and gave you some incentive to train the young hire.  Now you add a young person and his affordable plan cost at 9.5% of his pay is likely to force the company to reduce the coverage offered to its longer time employees to keep the young hire's health insurance below 9.5% or cost you a $3000 penalty tax.  Or you do not hire the young person.  It is so simple.  More and more Americans are realizing how ridiculous the Democrat Party claims are and the lock-step adherence to the party line will be deadly to the Democrats.

Another clear example of the inability of the Democrats to think rationally and independently is the adherence to the claim that man's emissions of CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming.  After 17 years of no surface temperature increase and rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, this claim has become entirely laughable.  Yet Obama just recently made the claim that 97% of scientists support the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis, which is also a very untrue statement.  So his EPA is putting out a new regulation to keep anyone from building a coal-fired power plant and he still has not approved the Keystone XL Pipeline using this specious argument as the justification.  It is imposing many uneconomic mandates such as for the use of ethanol in gasoline, an increase in vehicle gasoline efficiency, electric vehicle programs, and programs pushing solar and wind energy generation that are very much hurting the economy and helping to raise the unemployment rate.  Despite these obvious deleterious effects, few Democrats have departed from the party line.

No X, I prefer to think for myself and be a member of the Republican Party that at least sometimes acts to slow down or stop the growth of society-destroying government.  I will remain in the libertarian and the Tea Party wing which is most determined to keep the iron hob-nailed boot of government off of our necks.  However many people want to be dependents of the government, I will not be one who wants that.  I want to be left alone by gangs of thugs to establish my own cooperative agreements with others to work toward our mutually chosen goals.  It really matters to me both that I am able to pursue my goals and that they are able to pursue theirs.

Please give what I am saying some real thought X.

Hope

Strange that so few people understand that hope is contingent upon having the freedom to make your own value choices and make their achievement your personal dream.  Without the dream, there is no hope.  Without the value choice, there is no dream.

Understanding this simple fact makes Obama's idea of big government dictated values a hope-killer.  Hope becomes an illusion, an empty promise, a delusion of the masses when the special interests that control government replace personal value choices by each of us with their enforced value choices.  The way his administration is playing out is making this "hope" phantasm all too apparent.

The Corrupting Influence of Excessive Power

It is finally becoming apparent to many Americans that the Obama administration is corrupted to its core.  That it would be the case was clear to me when he was still a candidate for President in 2008.  One had only to consider his stated purposes which were incompatible with good government, listen to his criticism of the U.S. Constitution, see the pattern of his attempts to hide his personal history, and to study such of that history as was available to a reader willing to actively seek information about him.  His ideals were a con.  They were unattainable or they were undesirable to the rational man.  He probably only believed in some of his stated values even himself.  In many ways he conned himself.

With time, the transgressions of this administration against good governing have mounted.  The failures to prosecute voter intimidation, Fast and Furious, the grants to sham energy companies run by campaign donors, the bailouts for labor unions, the arbitrary exemptions to ObamaCare provisions, the infringement of freedom of religion in ObamaCare rulings, the long known, but only recently much discussed, IRS vendetta against smaller government groups, the lies about Benghazi, the statement of his brain and forever adviser, Valerie Jarrett, that after the election they would really go after their enemies on the right, the massive voter fraud, and the recently revealed infringements against freedom of the press, all tell a story of corruption at the core of Obama's administration.

Great power corrupts greatly.  This is not just because people of less than the most sterling character are tempted to misuse that great power.  It is even more because that great power cannot be exercised even by the best intention without ignoring a solid fact about man's nature - individuals are very complex and highly differentiated.

Laws must be applied equally and universally.  There are few actions of man that can be regulated by equal and universal law without causing harm to many individuals, who are inherently not equal and not universally facing the same circumstances from the same base of experience with the same capabilities and values.

Those charged with enforcing excessive bodies of law will also become frustrated in time with the mess they can hardly deny they have created.  Criticism is eventually piled upon them.  Many such rulers lose any ideals they may have had and simply become child-like in their determination to have their own way.  To be sure, excessive law has been so dominant in our society now for so long that those most likely to scramble to the top in the quest for power rarely ever use ideals as much more than a con game to collect votes to get the power they seek.  Obama is clearly such a person.

Getting rid of Obama as soon as possible is not an adequate solution.  There are many, many politicians eager to get their chance to exercise excessive control over the myriad individuals of our society.  Some may be more corrupt than Obama and many will be less corrupt.  That corruption is bad, yet it is also the most dramatic indicator that big government has its faults.  Even people paying little attention to understanding government will at least notice these more obvious instances of corruption.

What we really need is for people to acquire the much more fundamental understanding that there are few instances in which laws of a universal and equal nature can be beneficially applied to the richly diverse individuals of our society.   Good government tries first to do no harm.  No one deserves to be harmed by government, save those who are using force or fraud to harm others.

The Utilitarian idea that good government acts to provide the greatest good for most people always fails for many reasons.  Most fundamental is the one I pointed out above that people are complex and highly differentiated.  Government cannot know each of us and what is good for each of us in any broad way.  Indeed, what is good for each of us is constantly changing in our own life.  How on Earth is a mere politician or bureaucrat going to know what is best for each of us, when it is hard for us to know that?

It is also important to note that even if every government law were good for 51% of the people, the many such laws would almost certainly mean that at best we will be helped 51% of the time and hurt 49% of the time.  Most of us can surely do better than that making our own decisions in the private sector.  But it is actually worse than this.  This is because big government falls under the control of factions or special interests to a very large degree.  The laws of such big government will favor them at the expense of most of us most of the time.  Many people live in a fantasy world in which they are convinced that they can chose such an upright politician that he will prevent these special interests from tilting the playing field in their favor.  This is actually the most unlikely of outcomes.  It would even be unlikely if most of the politicians were well-intended, which is a most unlikely case itself.

As we have seen most dramatically demonstrated with Obama, he is not only venal, but he is also an incompetent manager of the government.  Indeed, he is not alone.  Throughout the Executive Branch, the managers are largely incompetent.  The House of Representatives and the Senate are mostly filled with incompetent managers eager to create more and more unnecessary and harmful laws to prove that they are doing something.  Meanwhile, they fail to read the bills they pass, they fail to review and correct prior bad laws, they pass off their deliberative duties to bureaucrats, they fail to protect and defend the Constitution, they use inside information to make investment killings, they extort companies into making political contributions to them, and they reward their political donors with all sorts of special favors.  Then we have a host of federal judges who do not understand or choose to disregard the Constitution.

These many failings are no surprise.  They are exactly what the wise man expects of big government.  Governments do not want to be limited by a constitution and they surely do not wish to be good governments.  Only a People strongly imbued with a strong principled belief in limited government devoted to the protection of every individual's right to life, liberty, property, the ownership of their own bodies, minds, and labor, and the pursuit of their personal happiness will ever enjoy the benefits of good government.

Responding to a Progressive Elitist University Request for Donations

A Brown University student of the Class of 2015 sent me an e-mail request for a donation to the university from which I earned my Sc.B. in Physics degree in 1969.  Because of the magnitude of the tragedy that Brown has so failed to provide young and bright students with an adequate education, I took the time to write the following response:

It is precisely because far too many faculty, staff, and students at Brown University view themselves as "partners and agents for collective social change" that I am deprived of the pleasure of supporting a real education at Brown.  They share the image of themselves as Progressive Elitists justified fully in the use of governmental force to impose values on a largely immoral or amoral people.  They wish to micromanage the lives of millions of people they do not know, yet consider incompetent to manage their own lives.  They ignore the essential fact that people are complex and highly differentiated in character, life circumstance, and values.  They seek an easily acquired sense of intellectual and moral superiority, while abrogating to themselves power and money taken by force.

A real education would encourage students to see how honoring the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own body, mind, and labor, and the pursuit of personal happiness is the real path to achieving the general welfare.  This education would illustrate the need for a legitimate government whose only purpose was the support of these individual rights and which would never seek to harm some while claiming it was helping the majority or some favored minority.  A real education would make it clear that a government that forces some or many to serve the interests of others is tyranny and disruptive of the real benefits of life in a society.  It would show how those benefits flow from the incredible richness of choices and freedom of action when all of our relationships are freely chosen for our mutual benefit.  It would honor freedom of conscience and of association, rather than crippling these freedoms as the big government approved by most at Brown University does.  These freedoms are critical to man who must live by the use of his mind.  An education is supposed to aid man in developing the rationality and analytical capability of that mind.

Unfortunately, any money I give to Brown is used mostly to deprive me and those I love of our individual rights.  It is used to increase the level of already exorbitant tyranny in the Land of the Free.  It is used to diminish the many wonderful advantages of living among others willing to engage in a free trade of ideas, goods, and services.  It creates a government so complex that the vast majority of citizens cannot understand what it is doing and how to control it.  They become pawns due to their limited time, money, and intellect to those few Progressive Elitists who actually do control government to some degree.  But just as the slave master was enslaved by his slaves, so are the Elitists enslaved by the ignorant or insufficiently informed people they think they control.

Soon, as is the case now, control of government is really in the hands of haphazard and conflicting special interest groups (factions in the terms of the founders), who step in and take what they want at the expense of everyone else.  A few of these special interests or factions:

• Crony mercantilists such as green energy companies,
• GE, GM, Chrysler, Boeing with its Export Bank subsidies,
• farmers with crop supports,
• students taking government student loans,
• faculty taking government funded research grants,
• labor unions forcing workers to pay them dues and buying politicians' votes, while systematically underfunding worker pension plans,
• radical environmentalists claiming that economic development is the enemy even as developed countries do most to clean their environments,
• global warming alarmists falsely accusing user's of fossil fuels of overheating the planet,
• people faking disabilities by the millions,
• millions on unemployment benefits for years,
• big bankers and stock investors happy to see the Federal Reserve flood the economy with devaluing printed money,
• home buyers buying homes they cannot afford with government encouragement,
• insurers happy to see people forced to buy health insurance they cannot afford for coverage they do not need as the government asserts its ownership of our very bodies,
• millions happy to use food stamps and other welfare rather than take a job,
• those who use government licensing to keep others out of their profession, 
• a huge government-run education establishment dominated by pro-big government propaganda, teachers unions, and mediocrity,
• large companies that seek to cripple smaller companies with a myriad unintelligible regulations, and of course
• the many power-hungry and corrupt politicians who populate both major parties, though especially the one most favoring the accelerating growth of government.

I had the independence of mind and the knowledge of history, economics, civics, business, and science to withstand the many pressures at Brown to conform to the Progressive Elitist viewpoint that the brutal use of force to accomplish their goals was justified by the claimed purity of those goals.  Of course, kings and aristocrats of old, slave owners, fascists, and communists all made very similar claims.  The end result for any society that deprives its individual citizens of their rights is all too well-known and can be ignored only by the ignorant or the malevolent.

Being a small business owner who has repeatedly converted his limited retirement funds into capital to keep his independent laboratory going through this government caused and government maintained recession of five years duration, my charity activity has to be carefully directed to those fighting the critical battle of our time, indeed of all time.  I am supporting the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Atlas Society, the Institute for Justice, the Club for Growth, the Tea Party movement, the NFIB, and the Right to Work Committee.

Brown University is not very competitive given its concerted deception and propaganda exercised on young minds, too many of which are weak.  It gives me no pleasure to say this, since it is a huge tragedy that Brown is not performing the great service it should be and could be doing.