Small Employment Improvement, But Lost Recession Jobs Still Not Replaced

The missing job situation in this recession and generally as a result of government malfeasance since 1990 is shown in the plot below:

The number of missing jobs is falling, though it does this every year at the this time in these non-seasonally adjusted numbers derived from the household survey data of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  If we compare the number of missing jobs relative to January 2000, for the last several July months, we find that the number is slightly lower at 20.747 million now than it was in July 2012 and July 2011, but it is slightly higher than in July 2010.  This leaves us far short of replacing the jobs lost in the never-ending Great Socialist Recession, so long owned and perpetuated by Obama.  Job growth is taking care of population growth, but it is not replacing the recession lost jobs.  This is truly a stagnant economy with no increase in our standard of living in sight.

Let us examine more of the employment numbers:

The number of employed people has increased recently and the number of missing jobs has improved as the percentage of employed work age people increased to 59.05%.  This is higher than the percent of employed people which was stuck in the 58 - 59% range for so long in this recession.  The real unemployment rate long stuck in the 13%-plus range is now down to 12.5%.

While many of the new jobs most recently may have been part-time jobs as reported, the average work week is still 34.4 hours, compared to 34.6 hours a week in July 2006 and July 2007.  This is only a 0.6% reduction in work hours compared to the two years prior to the recession. The effect of ObamaCare in converting full time jobs into part time jobs is large on current hiring, but it will have to go on for some time before the average work week is substantially shortened.  I expect that the effect will continue to convert full-time work into part-time work and will in time have a big impact on the average work week.

Given the number of jobs added from June to July in the seasonally unadjusted household survey, it will take 5.4 years to employ the same fraction of the population that was employed in December 2007 if the population increases at 1% a year.  This is a very optimistic projection based on a particularly large monthly increase of employed people of 272,000 and given that the economy is slowing once again.  Even with this unrealistic and optimistic projection, this Great Socialist Recession unemployment crisis will have lasted 11 years from its start in December 2007.  It will outlast Obama.

6 Aug 2013 Addition:

Since the Great Socialist Recession began in December 2007, the number of Americans 16 and older has increased by 13.889 million according to the BLS household survey data.  Yet, 1.988 million fewer Americans are employed now than in December 2007.  Obama's recovery claims are a complete distortion of reality. Yes, jobs are being added, but the rate of jobs added is lower than it was from 1993 to 2000, despite the opportunity to recover from a deep recession and the normal opportunities to employ a growing population of working age people.  Obama's socialist policies are doing exactly what such policies always do -- they are putting people out of work and lowering their standard of living.

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.

Obama Year 5 Economic Recovery Collapse

The 22 July 2013 Wall St. Journal headlined "Growth Outlook Stuck in Neutral."  It reports how slightly rosier economic predictions earlier in the year are proving to be too optimistic.  It notes that the expected Second Quarter growth has been downgraded to a mere 1.5%, down from an expectation one month earlier that it would grow at an annualized rate of 1.9%.  Recall, as I often point out, that since population growth is about 1% a year, real per capita GDP growth is about 1% less than the real GDP growth.  Consequently, the Second Quarter growth projection is actually only 0.5% in terms of an improved standard of living and in terms of serving employers to think about hiring.  Of course employers are mostly converting people to part time jobs thanks to ObamaCare, so most new hires are a downgrade from a full-time job somewhere to a part time job somewhere else.  This in turn has caused a sudden decrease in retail spending to only 0.4% in June, which is really -0.6% when corrected for population growth.  Worries are rising that the second half of 2013 will not live up to earlier expectations also.

Once again, the expectations of the Obama administration, or at least its and its media running dogs public announcements, have proven wrong on predictions of an improving economy.  In fact, Obama is wrong for the fifth time out of five such claims.  The man and his supporters are remarkably consistent in being wrong.  This, of course, comes from being remarkably wrongheaded in their aims and in their understanding of the economy.  Strangely enough, it proves impractical to thwart the economic rights of individual entrepreneurs.  Who could ever have imagined that!

The recoveries of 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and now of 2013 have all collapsed.  But Americans, just keep going on about your business and keep that faith in Hope and Change, and love that Obama smile.  Keep moving on.  There is nothing to see here.

Signing Up to be a Federal Government Contractor

Years ago, I signed my laboratory, Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc., up as a federal contractor under the system the government was using at the time.  I was submitting an SBIR proposal which turned out to be in competition with about 60 other small businesses for a research and development grant.  About 6 weeks after these 60 small companies went to great expense to submit their proposals, the agency sent us a letter that said that because some other agency had requested a rather similar proposal a year earlier, they were not going to fund any grants under this request for proposals at all.  There was, of course, no apology for the agency's lack of homework in requesting the proposals and no expression of sorrow for the blow to the many small companies who never even had a chance to get a return on their investment.  Federal government bureaucrats simply are unable to imagine the harm they do.  I decided that applying for SBIRs was just too risky for my business and went years without applying for any contracts.

Recently, I performed two analyses for a federal agency which so impressed it that it decided it wanted five more such analyses.  These individual analyses were performed for three thousand dollars apiece and could be paid for with a credit card.  Over the years since my last bad SBIR experience, any work I had done for the federal government was performed at its request for credit card payment without the formality of being a registered government contractor.  As a result, my company did not need to be in the federal contractor system until this agency just requested that I respond to their RFQ for 5 more analyses on a contract.

So, I spent much of Thursday afternoon and evening and Friday afternoon setting my laboratory up in the new federal contractor system call SAM.  This system is integrated with Dun and Bradstreet, so I had to update my listing there and figure out how to get SAM to update obsolete information it had from an old set of data from years ago from Dun and Bradstreet.  Even before I could do that, I had to figure out how to get the system to authorize me to update the information it had imported from the old system in use years ago when I had put in a proposal for the ill-fated SBIR.  Then I had to wait until Friday to get that authorization.

Among the remaining tasks was the required reading of 45 FAR and DFARS requirements placed upon federal contractors on a host of issues.  One has to affirm that one is in compliance with each.  To understand these federal requirements, one is often referred to various laws.  In one case, one is told that the definition of an entity is to be found in a law and that it is different than the meaning the IRS gives to the same identifier in the Internal Revenue Code.  Apparently, small business owners have an infinite amount of time that bureaucrats and Congressmen can assume is readily dedicated to the finer points of their games.  No links are provided to the laws in question.

Once again, I am most impressed that the federal government has absolutely no sense of what expenses in time and effort it is appropriate to impose upon small businesses to do the work which the federal government is unable to do for itself.  For the government to have any ability at all to pose as competent, it has to turn to contractors to do its work.  Yet, when it does so, it does its darnedest to impose many of the inefficiencies and irrelevancies of the government bureaucracy on companies of the private sector.  It has no concern whatsoever for the value of the small business management's time.  None.

What the federal bureaucracy does care about is that it appears to have some concern for the issues of these FAR and DFARS.  If some contractor does violate one of them, it wants to be able to slam the responsible parties into prison or to heavily fine them.  Woe to the small business owner who rushes through these requirements without understanding them.  Woe to the small business owner who uses the time he could be using to earn a living to thoroughly understand these requirements.  This is a Catch-22 common to dealing with Big Government.

Many a small business simply cannot afford the assumed level of understanding and hence assumes a level of risk which the average citizen has no concern about, just as the bureaucrat and the Congress and the President have on concern.  Big government does not like small businesses.  It cannot comprehend a business which is less than very large.  Small businesses with resources that actually have to be earned the old-fashioned way with hard work simply live in a different world from governments.  Business owners are also a minority, so they count little at election time.  Indeed, most politicians think it makes nothing but sense to treat small business owners as villains while courting the votes of the worker bees.  Basically, government justifies its intrusiveness in everyone's life almost entirely upon the claim that business owners are villains and only Big Government can control them.  So, who cares how much time government forces these villains to waste?  It really is all very logical.

But, what would the private sector be without small businesses?  It is odd that few voters ever give much thought to the function of government, either what is does or what it should do.  It is even more odd that few voters think about the critical role of small businesses in the private sector that has to produce the wealth and perform the tasks so profligately squandered by Big Government.

Ethanol Mandate to Add Twenty to Thirty-Five Cents Per Gallon in 2014 to Gas Cost

The 20-21 July 2013 Wall Street Journal notes that the ever-increasing ethanol requirement would now force refiners to exceed the 10% ethanol content in gasoline over which consumers will not go.  Consequently, the refiners are forced to buy Renewable Energy Credits at great expense.  These are called RINs.  This is increasing the cost of gasoline by about 10 cents a gallon.  Because the mandate requirement goes up each year and the cost of RINs is skyrocketing, the cost per gallon in 2014 due to the ethanol mandate is expected to be between 20 and 35 cents a gallon!

Obama's wish to see gasoline prices skyrocket is being promoted by his administration by limiting oil production on federal land and off-shore, by limiting oil refinery capacity, by limiting pipeline construction, and with the ethanol mandate.  His White House energy adviser, Heather Zichal, is still making the false claim that ethanol use reduces climate change!  This is just one of many ways in which Obama's ideas and supporters are very old-fashioned.  Add this to the old-timers list of Marxism, peak-oil, environmental doom, and a longing for a ruling aristocracy dedicated to caring for the incompetent peasant masses, while enjoying the honors and wealth of their ruling positions.

As I have pointed out many times, ethanol use neither decreases pollution nor increases the energy supply, contrary to the claims made in 2007 when the ethanol mandate was put into effect.  The ethanol mandate would be repealed if Congress were at all interested in the best interest of the People.  That Congress has left this mandate in effect is proof-positive of the venality of Congress.  That they cannot be bothered to repeal such an unnecessary expense for Americans informs us of how little they actually do represent us.

The Obama Economic Stagnation and Real American Growth

As government takes control over more and more of the wealth of the nation, the economy staggers.  Obama is the quintessential Big Government man who has no appreciation for the fact that our real standard of living is improved not by government, but by private sector enterprises.  But improving most Americans standard of living takes time, and today very many Americans seem to want to benefit from government redistributions that will immediately transfer the wealth created by a minority to a majority less able or willing to create that wealth.  This is a short-sighted aim even for the immediate beneficiary, since redistribution results in the total wealth of the society becoming smaller over time than it would otherwise become.  It is also generally the case that those who think they will benefit from the forced transfer of wealth will fall victim to exaggerated promises and condemn their own children to a much more bleak future.  Others believe that some under-performing or disadvantaged Americans will be better off if forced transfers of wealth occur, but do not think that many such people will be better off over a greater part of their lives if the whole American economy grows healthily than if it does not.

If you are a 30-year-old American today, you are probably going to work until you are 70 years old.  The size of the American economy in 40 years will have a big impact on the quality of your retirement, not to mention many of the years between now and then.  Let us suppose you actually want your children to live in an economy that offers a much higher standard of living than we have now.  The median American mother is now 31 years old, which means that barring changes in that, her children will be having their own children a median 31 years from now.  Let us consider the size of the American economy 31 years from now under various growth rates to see how this newly long generation of 31 years will affect the next generation of children.

Of course we are interested in using real GDP numbers, not the nominal numbers affected by games played upon the money supply.  Unfortunately, the actual numbers reported by the government for real GDP are not fully corrected for inflation, but we will assume future numbers will be truthful.  In addition, in terms of its impact on our standard of living, we must be aware that the U.S. population has been growing by about 1% a year.  Thus, a real GDP growth of 2.0 %, the rate of GDP increase under the last four years under Obama, is really only a real per capita GDP of 1.0 %.  Note also that when America had much less government, it was able to sustain long-term real growth rates of 5 and 6%.  The following plot shows how the real, per capita size of an economy will grow over a generation of 31 years assuming a continued population growth rate of 1% a year.

So, assuming that the 2.0% growth rate under Obama is continued for 31 years, as one expects given his anti-business policies, the real per capita GDP will only be 36.1% larger then than now.  How incredibly disappointing that will be!  On the other hand, were the government to shrink considerably, we might easily average a real GDP growth rate of 5% a year and the real per capita GDP would be 3.373 times its present size in 31 years.  The Obama economy is easy to imagine and little different than the present economy.  The small government per capita economy would be two full U.S. present economies larger than the Obama economy and such a robust and innovative economy is really very difficult to imagine.  But, such an economy will make almost every American much, much richer and much, much more secure than we are now.  Such an economy is worlds better than the Obama economy in terms of our standard of living.

Note that each additional percent of real GDP growth makes more and more difference to the future economy.  This curve has a strong upward bend, so any act of the government that makes it harder for businesses to grow takes a great deal away from our future.  If government regulations and new mandates by law make it harder for a company to even manage to match its last years income, we all pay for this in the long run.  And no, I am not talking about when we will be dead.  I am talking about long before recent college graduates will retire and the entire lives of their children.

One really needs to think about it when the EPA says that generating a bit more CO2 than they want us to will just conceivably cause a fraction of a degree higher temperature in 87 years so we should give up one or two percent of future GDP growth for this reason.  The damage of doing that to all of us is certainly much greater than any damage to the environment.  Indeed, I have shown over and over that the science used to make these claims is bad and the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is simply wrong.

Or take the wild claims of the EPA that mercury produced by coal-fired power plants has significant health consequences, so we should pay higher electricity costs to replace those power plants with much more expensive and unreliable power plants with their own environmental problems.  This EPA ruling also has important consequences for the growth rates of our economy.

We need to remember that every new paperwork requirement put on businesses also takes resources that they could otherwise be using to improve their products and services or their marketing efforts in a world market.  Businesses suffer greatly from the thousands of little cuts that unthinking state and federal legislators and state and federal bureaucrats just love to make, of course while acting as though they are saving the average American from some harm.

In fact, most of this is pretense.  Almost every business wants to improve the lives of its customers.  That is how they make money.  At least the majority who have no special favors from government do.  Yes, there are some state-regulated monopolies who are less well-behaved and there are crony mercantile companies such as Obama's green energy companies who are simply trying to take advantage of us.  But, these are companies corrupted by Big Government and eliminating it will also eliminate companies that no longer care to bring in customers on a voluntary basis for each others mutual benefit.

Americans Have Become So Wealthy, the Middle Class is Disappearing

According to the constant theme of the Democrat Socialist Party, the American Middle Class is disappearing because more people are poor than ever.  Well, despite the best efforts of those who are constantly trampling upon our rights to earn a living, as I have pointed out before, the Middle Class is disappearing because many more Americans are rising up out of it.  A recent post at the AEI Ideas blog shows this very well:

This chart is based on Census Bureau income data which is given in constant 2009 dollars.  I would certainly question the idea that the lower bound of the Middle Income Group is $25,000 a year and would set that at least at $35,000, but that would not change the fact that the percentage of families in the Middle Incomes is dropping as those in the Upper Incomes rises.  There is a slight decrease in the number in the lower income group.  The data does not yet show the effects of the never-ending Great Socialist Recession as many families have been worn down over the last four years.

Actually, if we look at this data a bit more closely over the period from about 1998 through 2009, the fraction of families in each income group has been about constant.  I would maintain that the longer term trend for families to leave the Middle Income Group for the Upper Income Group has been successfully foiled by Big Government with its increasing impediments to economic freedoms over that period.  If we want to restore the trend for Middle Income families to increasingly become Upper Income families, we need much less government interference in the private sector than we have seen over the last 15 years.

Bad Teachers are the Main Cause of Bad American Educations

The most important factor in student education is the quality of the teacher.  Unfortunately, the average teacher in America is neither bright nor well-educated.  This has long been my evaluation and that viewpoint is much confirmed in a report by Joy Pullman, Education Research Fellow at The Heartland Institute.

Her report notes:

• Students planning to major in education have below average SAT scores.  Students with below average SAT scores are also below proficient on state grade by grade tests.
• The education major curriculum is about the easiest of all college curricula.  Teaching majors need more college remedial work than humanities and social science majors.  Yet, teaching majors are rewarded with the highest college grades.
• Teachers with content-specific majors or who have had an earlier career are better teachers than those who majored in education and took courses emphasizing progressive teaching methods and ideology.
• Teachers with teaching certificates are not any better than those without the certificates.
• Despite low achievement, teachers commonly get early retirement and pay and benefits that are 50% higher than what others of similar ability get in the marketplace.

Of course, there is the occasional really phenomenal teacher, such as my daughter Kate who teaches biology courses in a charter school in a very poor neighborhood in New York City.  She had a dual major at Rochester Institute of Technology in both Biotechnology and Biomedical Sciences.  She had one-third more credit hours than needed to graduate as well with an amazing 4.00 GPA.   Her students consistently have about a 90% pass rate on the New York Regency Tests for Biology and she has just completed teaching the first Biology AP course offered in the school.  Kate was one of the best teachers of her school prior to getting her required teachers certificate, which she found very onerous because the education courses she had to take at Fordham University while in her first two years of teaching were incredibly boring and useless.

Kate says she has some 10th grade students who have third grade reading skills and who cannot write a coherent sentence, let alone a coherent paragraph.  Many more good, or even just decent, teachers are desperately needed.  It is difficult to conceive how bad a teacher is who allows students to go on to the next grade when they have never learned to read or write.  American schools are full to the brim with such teachers, while teachers such as Kate are exceedingly rare.

A Nation of Sovereign Individuals with Unalienable Rights

Obama's 6 July radio address said that on 4 July 1776, a small band of men declared that we Americans were created equal and free to think and worship as we pleased.  He said we were now a land of liberty and opportunity.

Obama did not say in what very limited manner we were equal because his agenda requires that to be vague.  He did not note that while we are still free to think and worship as we please, we are very often not free to speak and write what we think or to act upon our beliefs, religious or not.  He did not note that our liberties are constantly becoming fewer and that he wants them to become fewer.  He did not say that he also wants to dictate the nature of our ever more limited opportunities and pick who will be given greater opportunity than others with manipulative government policies.  He habitually defends unequal status before government as an honest effort to create equality among the People.

To understand how insulting this man's ideas and policies are to the sovereign rights of the individual, we really need a much better understanding of what our individual rights are than most people have.  Indeed, even our founding fathers had an inadequate view of them, though I generally admire them for having understood the problem as well as they did in their time.

The Declaration of Independence, agreed upon on 2 July and published on 4 July 1776, wonderfully stated that "all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Yes, I do not agree that our rights come from our "Creator", but they do derive as Ayn Rand observed from our nature.  At that time, almost everyone assumed the nature of man had been determined by man's Creator and therefore the rights that derived from man's nature were endowed by man's Creator.  This reference to our Creator is a big deal with many who are religious today and because they attribute many of their beliefs to the will of a god they know nothing about, there are unfortunate consequences to this.  Despite this error, there are many really great insights in this quoted statement of the Declaration of Independence.

The statement firmly places sovereignty in the hands of the People, not with government.  It clearly takes individual rights to be of a very broad nature.  Note that it even implies rights beyond those of each individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of their happiness with the word "among."  At the time, most Americans believed in the individual right to life, liberty, and property.  The substitution of pursuit of happiness for property was clearly a way of broadening the claim of individual rights.  Of course, the pursuit of happiness implied a freedom to acquire and keep property.  But, it also would imply such things as a freedom to choose one's own friends and domestic partners, to choose what books one would read, to choose a religion or not to choose one, to enter into trade with others of one's choosing for the purposes of one's choosing, to maintain the privacy one desires, and many more actions leading to any of the many means to and forms of happiness that individuals might choose.  This is a clear statement of a very broad concept of individual rights.

These rights are unalienable.  The existence of a government does not diminish these rights.  These rights are always sovereign in the individual.  These rights are not given to the individual by the government.  No, the government is only legitimate and able to claim a reason for its very existence to the extent that the government serves faithfully and well to protect these unalienable rights sovereign in the individual.  The government is the servant of individual rights and when it fails to protect them as a matter of principle, the sovereign individuals will reform and reorganize government by their right so that it does follow principles to protect their individual sovereign rights.

These are powerful, well-stated principles that are manifestly ignored and/or misunderstood by the Progressive Elitists who dominate most academic viewpoints on the role of government today.  This American principle of highly limited government with a legitimacy limited to its protection of individual rights held unalienably by sovereign individuals is unheard in academia, most media, and from most politicians.  The People, long educated in government-run and dominated schools, no longer have a clear concept of their sovereignty, of their broad rights, and of their equally unalienable claim to these rights.  Individuals are obviously unequal in most respects, but in the context of government, the most essential way in which they are equal is with respect to their equal and sovereign individual rights.  To give some people favored status by law is to abrogate this one critical respect in which we are equal before the law.  Those who most claim to believe in equality in the present political arena are most likely to destroy the most important sense in which we are equal.  For all of his talk promoting equality, the Progressive Elitist today believes in neither equal rights nor even one-man, one-vote.

The sovereignty of the individual is re-affirmed in the Preamble of the Constitution.  The statement of the highly limited powers of government issues from the sovereignty of the individuals who constitute that government.  The government is formed only to serve their needs by protecting their liberties and their general welfare.  This reference to general welfare is now often used in an out-of-context manner to support the welfare state and a massive redistribution of wealth.  This could not be further from the intention of the time.  No, then the general welfare implied government actions beneficial to everyone, not a bare majority or some special interest as it means today.  Securing individual rights would provide peace and tranquility, justice, and the general welfare for everyone.  No other government purpose can do this.  Other government actions will most likely be unjust to many, require threats of violence upon many, and will harm the interests of many.

The 9th Amendment of the Bill of Rights makes a clear statement that the rights of the individual are broad and are indeed unalienable.  They are not to be denied or disparaged by the government.  It is no small infraction of the principle of legitimate government that our government has long ignored this amendment and overtly claimed it to be meaningless.  Indeed, the Supreme Court has actually claimed that the government is sovereign, which it most manifestly is not.  Were this the case, then there would be no means by which a legitimate government could be formed and judged.  There would be no possible basis for overthrowing it when it became tyrannical and inimical to the rights of the individual.  Such a government would be inconsistent with both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Indeed, a sovereign government, rather than a government serving to protect the rights of sovereign individuals, is inconceivable in a human-centered morality in which individuals think and act as individuals for the purpose of preserving their lives, flourishing in liberty, and pursuing their own happiness.

This enlightenment and early American view of sovereign individual rights and very limited government legitimately protecting individual rights is very much at odds with the loose and hoary notions of government and rights held by Obama, the Progressive Elitists, and other advocates of big government today.  They assume that it is the purpose of government to grant individuals such rights as it may choose to give them.  They assume that government is supposed to hurt the interests of many for the purpose of helping some who are incompetent in living their lives.  They believe it is just and moral to propagate innumerable laws and regulations limiting our individual freedoms, even as each mandate is enforced by the threat of violence should anyone stand upon their individual rights.  No peace and tranquility are possible as faction upon faction, special interest upon special interest, and even race upon race, battle for control of the brutal power of government.  It is clear that by the criteria of our own Declaration of Independence, our government today is illegitimate.

The rational American does not celebrate the federal government on the 4th of July.  He celebrates the American Principle set forth by the Declaration of Independence and implemented in the Constitution by the mandate of American individuals.  The American Principle states that the individual is sovereign and each individual has equal and broad rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It states that the only legitimate purpose of government is the protection of the unalienable rights of the individual.  Due to this very limited function, government has and can claim but few powers.  The sovereign individual retains his sovereignty with respect to the freedom to exercise his rights, while government is entirely his servant devoted to the sole task of protecting the rights of each and every individual American.  By adherence to this dedicated purpose, good government harms no one and never initiates the use of force against anyone.

United Nations Does Not Take Global Warming Seriously

The United Nations IPCC has issued four reports claiming that mankind faces a catastrophe due to man-made global warming from CO2 emissions.  Five years ago, Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. Secretary General, issued a mandate to U. N. organizations to develop plans to reduce their carbon footprints.  To date, only 10 of the 49 U.N. organizations, employing 220,000 people, have management-approved carbon reduction plans in-place.  As Donna Laframboise points out, this is proof the United Nations does not take the UN IPCC man-made global warming catastrophe claim seriously. 

Unfortunately, the UN IPCC Report 4 is nonetheless the authority cited by the USA EPA as the justification for declaring CO2 a pollutant subject to the anti-air pollution regulations it issues.  The EPA is acting without the approval of Congress on this matter, so it is also putting the UN ahead of our own elected representatives.  How odd it is that the UN is enthusiastic about the power it will acquire as the monitoring organization for energy use, but not equally enthusiastic about reducing its own CO2 emissions.  Or is it odd?  It would be odd only if the UN were nominally a rational organization which was actually concerned with acting morally.

Taking the Fifth is Always Wise Policy, Especially Under Big Government

A law Professor, James Duane of the Regent Law School of Virginia Beach, VA, offers a very interesting and convincing argument for why anyone questioned by the police should always take the 5th.  This is a really entertaining and enlightening presentation. 

Among other points, he notes that the complexity of the law is itself a reason for not talking to the police or for that matter to IRS agents.  The federal government has no idea how many federal criminal laws there are.  What is more, one might reveal that one has violated some obscure federal agency regulation or interpretation of a law or that one is even guilty because you have violated a law of another nation to which you have never been.  Under big government, no one is innocent.

Also, cooperation with the police will not help you.  A police officer cannot testify that you helped them or that what you said exonerated you, since that is taken as mere hearsay and is not permissible evidence.  Talking to government agents can only hurt you.

Any mistake or seemingly irrelevant little lie will hurt you.  Even the truth stated by an innocent man can hurt him.  Then again, the police may mis-remember what you said and that can be used against you.  Or a wrong witness contradicting something you said may hurt your chances of avoiding conviction.

This is a seriously important presentation, which also indicates the great wisdom of our Bill of Rights:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik

H/t Alexander Strugatsky.

Additional Child Tax Credit for Tax Refunds for Children in Mexico

An Indiana TV station has a most interesting story on the foolish behavior of the federal government and the IRS in particular.  It has revealed that illegal aliens are filing federal tax returns claiming children as dependents living in the U.S., who are actually in Mexico.  According to tax returns, in one trailer in southern Indiana there are supposed to be four illegal male aliens living there with 20 children, most of them claimed to be nieces and nephews.  The only child actually living there, is one daughter of the only illegal alien living there.  Numerous such IRS falsified filings are resulting in tax refunds of $12,000 or more.  The annual cost to the taxpayer is more than $4 billion and the IRS is doing nothing about it.  The IRS agents are clearly too busy trying to keep non-Progressive Elitist groups from tax-exempt status and trying to take over our medical records and control of our health insurance to take possession of our very bodies.

My Response to a Democrat Politician's Wife Request on Father's Day

Karmen Walker Brown is the wife of Anthony Brown, the present Lt. Governor of the state of Maryland, who is now running for Governor.  Anthony Brown has served under the present governor of Maryland, Martin O'Malley.

O'Malley is a strong Obama supporter and has aspirations to run for the office of the President.  He has also strongly pushed applying the high state sales tax to gasoline sales, on top of the fixed cost gasoline tax now in place.  He has forced Maryland electric utilities to buy expensive alternative fuels and pass the costs on to the consumer.  He increased the sales tax by 20%, the top personal income tax rate by 16%, and the top corporate tax rate by 18%.  He pushed for and signed a gun control law that drastically infringes the right to bear arms in Maryland.  He even promoted and signed a rain tax on Marylanders that taxes them for any impervious surfaces on their property.  Before he became governor, he was mayor of Baltimore and presided over that city's horrendous public school system as it became even worse.  He headed the Democratic Governors Association from 2011 - 2013.

The Democrat Socialist Party has tight control of the Maryland state government.  It has large majorities in both houses of the legislature and it has controlled the governor's office for a long time.  The Democrats manage this dominance with a very touchy, feely approach.  Karmen Brown is playing this game now by requesting huge numbers of Marylanders to sign a Father's Day card for her husband Anthony.  Here is how this works:

If you asked Anthony what the most important thing is to him, I know what his answer would be: Family. Our kids mean the world to him.

Father’s Day is one of Anthony’s favorite days. It’s a time for our family – and families across Maryland – to come together and celebrate what’s really important.

With Father’s Day coming up this weekend, the kids and I are hoping you can help us out. We’re putting together a big card and we want you to sign it! I know he’d love hearing from his friends and supporters on such a special day.

Click here now to wish Anthony a Happy Father’s Day.

For Anthony, there’s no doubt that being a father is his most important job. You can see it in the way he helps the kids with their homework or asks about their day.

He’s as dedicated to them as he is to making life better for kids across Maryland. It’s why he works – every day – to improve schools, create jobs, and ensure that all families have access to the health care they need to thrive. He knows that this great state is only as strong as the families who call Maryland home.

That’s why the kids and I want to give Anthony a big Father’s Day surprise.

Can you take a minute to sign our card for Anthony? Click here to add your name.

Thanks and Happy Father’s Day,

Here is my response to Karmen Brown:

Karmen,

I vote on my conviction that there is no political value as great as that of the individual for his individual rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of his own body, mind, and labor, and the pursuit of his personal happiness.  The individual has a very wide right to freedom of conscience and association, which is not to be infringed by the state.  Gov. O'Malley has been committed to almost constant infringement of individual rights, as indeed any big government advocate and user of brutal force for any purpose but the protection of individual rights must be.  Lt. Gov. Brown has been his ally in these tyrannical infringements of individual rights.  It is very unlikely that he will be able to convince me that he is the less wrongheaded and evil of the two thugs who will be running for Governor under the nomination of the two major parties.

I believe I was put on your list of favorably inclined people because I believe in marriage equality.  Yes, such a belief is implied by individual rights, but so is the belief that I own my own body and that as such I have the right to control my health care and health insurance.  ObamaCare claims that my body belongs to the government.  I reject that claim and I have no intention of selling my body to the government even at the cost of being sent to prison.  I defend all of the rights of the individual, including the right of some to say things that may hurt the feelings of others. Our right to bear arms shall not be infringed.  Bloggers and all writers have the same freedoms as are protected for newspapermen and for the same reason that we all have the right to use our minds and freely express our beliefs in speech, in writing, and in assembly.  We have the right to choose who we will hire, to choose our clients, to choose our friends, and choose our sex and domestic partners.

The rights of the individual are broad and the legitimate functions of government are narrow.  This was established in our earliest founding document, the Declaration of Independence.  The proclamation there established the basis for a People of sovereign individuals mandating the very limited powers of the Constitution and setting up a government which is not sovereign, but was only a legitimate means for sovereign individuals to protect their individual rights.  Note that the 9th and 10th Amendments of the Bill of Rights further inform us that the individual retains his sovereignty.

These issues are of such critical importance that they must be addressed by rational minds, not by feelings that seek to associate your big government thug with fatherhood and child-raising on Father's Day.  I too am a father and my greatest wish is that my three daughters will some day have federal and state governments that will protect, rather than violate, individual rights.  There is nothing else so important.  This is why many a man has fought for these rights and many have given up their lives to protect them.

In a society which protects individual rights, we are enabled to choose our own values and manage our own lives with all of the advantages of free trades in all aspects of our associations with other individuals.  Then and only then can we all pursue our dreams in a harmonious way.  Then and only then are we free to hope that the future will be good and better for us all.  Free minds are the most essential means for improving our standard of life, our security, and for achieving our happiness.

Charles

Charles R. Anderson, Ph.D.
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Obama Transparency Requires the Elimination of Inspector Generals

When one is busy maintaining the con game that your administration is the most transparent administration in history, it is really awkward having inspector generals pointing out the shortcomings of your agencies.  The Obama administration being the most thoroughly corrupt administration in my lifetime and probably forever since the measure of corruption is both a function of the degree of corruption and the scale of that which is corrupt.  The government has never before been as big and it wields an increasing amount of power simply by decree of the Executive Branch.  The Obama administration has maximized both the scale of the power wielded and the degree of its corruption.

In this light, it is very interesting that according to a Wall St. Journal article by Joseph Schmitz entitled Obama's Inspector General Negligence, Obama has failed to nominate Inspector General candidates for the State, Interior, Labor, Defense, and Homeland Security departments for approval by the Senate.  He is also supposed to provide a nominee for the Agency for International Development.  The missing Inspector Generals have been missing for between 18 months and 5 years.  The State Department IG office has been occupied by a retired career State Dept. employee for the entire Obama presidency as a fill-in.  By law, he cannot hold the actual office permanently due to potential conflict of interest with the friendships and even the viewpoint of a career member of that organization.

These missing inspector generals are a boon to those who wish to operate our government corruptly.  One of the nuisances such people face are the moral whistleblowers.  It is always a very dangerous task to tell the truth in any large organization that is hit by scandal.  Such organizations are usually intent on covering up the scandal.  So, one of the important duties of a fully empowered and Senate-approved IG is to protect whistleblowers.  It is not surprising that each of the three Benghazi whistleblowers has reported reprisals for their role in testifying before Congress.  It also is not surprising that there are few who are willing to step forward and tell the truth.

While the general pattern of corruption in the Obama administration is all too clear, those who persist in claiming that the corruption is not tied to Obama and his cabal of close advisers should be telling us why he has had so little interest in doing his job as required by the Inspector Generals Act of 1978.  Is he just that incompetent that he cannot get the job done?  Or does he just prefer to learn about scandals for the first time from the mostly friendly, immoral press, rather than from a possibly objective and all-too-moral Inspector General?

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.

A Terrorist Bombing Spree

In April, 36 bombs were mailed to judges, businessmen, and politicians.  In June, 8 bombs were exploded in an hour and a half period.  One destroyed Attorney General Mitchell Palmer's home, but failed to kill him or his family members.  Other bombs went off in New York City, Boston, Patterson NJ, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.  The year was 1919 and anarchists were attacking American government and businesses.

Terrorist attacks are not a new thing in America.  We survived them before without drastically trading our individual rights for a false security.  We can likewise survive the terrorism of Islamic jihadists without trading in our individual rights, though many have claimed otherwise and many are eager to make that bad trade.