Ed Hudgins -- Producers vs. Expropriators: America's Coming Civil War?

I like this essay by Edward Hudgins of The Atlas Society entitled Producers vs. Expropriators: America's Coming Civil War?  Please go and read it.

But, I also want to urge upon all of you the need to enlarge our argument with socialism even beyond the important Producers vs. Expropriators conflict.  Socialism does not recognize our right to be individuals who think for ourselves, choose our own values, and then act to live our lives in accordance with our own values and goals.  Socialists are not just expropriators of wealth and income, they are also dictators who force us to ignore our own minds and values and harness all of our actions to their dictated ideas, values, and goals.  There are many Americans of modest productivity, who may appear to be net beneficiaries of the expropriation of wealth and income, but who are very upset by the idea that someone else, such as a socialist elite, will force them to live their lives by values they have not chosen for themselves.  Many of the Tea Party protesters are people of modest productivity, but they simply want badly to have the right to manage their own lives according to their own values.  The guy who wants to work less and have lots of time for his family and for fishing is still an individual who often does not want Obama telling him he must buy health insurance acceptable to the government or send his daughter to a college the government finds acceptable for attendance by students with government student loans.

More broadly, the basic conflict is between individualist self-managers and brutal collectivist dictators, with most wealth producers on the individualist self-managers side, but many are also on the brutal collectivist dictators side.  The producers on the collectivist and value-imposing side are sometimes there due to guilt, sometimes to simply being prey to indoctrination, and sometimes because they see that as the way to protect the wealth against the socialists that they worked hard to build up.  Nonetheless, they have joined the enemy and we need to realize that some of our allies are not necessarily people who are highly productive of wealth and income.  They are simply self-managing individualists.

Postscript [15 April 2010, Southbury, CT]:  I first skimmed through Ed Hudgins essay when rushing to finish a ton of work including tax returns for business and personal purposes before heading to Connecticut to provide expert witness testimony in a court case.  I missed the fact that Ed has a short paragraph discussing some of the points I am making here.  Still, I believe these points need to be strongly emphasized.

Another Middle Class Tax on the Ill

It is not enough that Obama is taxing some people's health insurance plans, those who pay for medical devices, those who pay for clinical testing, and those who must buy insurance that covers medical devices or clinical testing.  These people are taxed whether they are making as much as $250,000 a year or not.  They are even taxed if they make less than $200,000 a year, since Obama believes in fuzzy math and now likes to place his taxing threshold at $200,000 - $250,000 a year.  In fact, if anyone pays these costs, they are paying a tax no matter what their income.  But, for good measure, Obama has also just used ObamaCare to increase taxes on many people with serious illnesses in another way.  This tax also applies to everyone, not just those making more than $250,000 or some other fuzzy threshold.  But who is counting Obama's lies anymore.  No one has the patience to count them all and track them.  It would be like counting every raindrop in a heavy rain storm covering your entire state.

Among those most likely to take itemized deductions on their federal income tax are those with serious medical problems.  If your medical expenses exceed 7.5% of your adjusted gross income, you may deduct the amount in excess of that limit.  This certainly applies to large numbers of ill people with incomes across the entire spectrum of incomes.  The ObamaCare bill has raised the deduction limit to 10% of adjusted gross income, meaning that many fewer people will qualify for this deduction and those who do will be allowed to deduct less than in the past.  Mark Hemingway, in an Opinion piece in The Examiner called Read the bill: Obamacare socks middle class with $3.9 billion tax increase notes that taxpayers earning less than $200,000 per year will pay $3.9 billion more in taxes in 2019 alone according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress's legislation official scorer.

The new law brings in $15.2 billion more over 10 years by limiting the medical deduction to that amount over 10% of adjusted gross income.  This new threshold will apply to most taxpayers in 2013, though it does not kick in for older taxpayers until 2017.  And note that the $3.9 billion rate of the tax increase for 2019 will only grow from that point on as more and more Baby Boomers who would have had a deduction will not have it or will have a smaller deduction.  A ten year rate based on the 2019 tax increase would be $39 billion, not the lower $15.2 billion increase in the first ten years as the new threshold is slowly put in place.  This is a big tax increase and it is applied to those who are sick and ill with little regard for their income.  Let me make this perfectly clear: This makes Democrat compassion a clear sham.

The Public School Scandal

I have stated over and over that our biggest problem in the fight for the equal, sovereign, and unalienable rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States of America is the fact that the education of our young is controlled by government.  Government at the local, state, and federal levels always has a conflict of interest in education.  American children need an education in which a cornerstone of their knowledge is knowing that legitimate government, as stated in our Declaration of Independence, is that government which governs with the consent of the governed for the purpose of securing their individual rights.  They need to understand that the purpose of the Constitution was to insure that the federal government had very limited powers dedicated to the purpose of securing individual rights and nothing more.  To understand how important this is, students need a knowledge of the history of great numbers of governments which oppressed the People.  They need a realistic knowledge of the Capitalist system with its free markets for goods, services, and ideas and how that system serves every unique individual by allowing them many, many choices and an easy path to forming many voluntary associations with others for specialized purposes of their own.  They need to understand that socialism cannot accommodate individual rights, cannot recognize the individuality and uniqueness of each of us, and cannot allow us to develop and express ourselves as the individuals we are.  Students need to understand that a Capitalist, free market society offers a richness of life no other system can offer.  Yet, all governments inevitably want to grow and want to feel needed in far more ways than the protection of our individual rights.  And frankly, many politicians hunger for power and learn how to use special interest groups to help them attain it.  Hence, government has a fundamental conflict-of-interest when it is put in charge of running our education system.

Yet, in America, as in most countries, government is in charge of the education of our young.  We know that the quality of government-run education in many other fields than history and civics is also very disappointing.  The governments that run the welfare system, the DMVs, job licensing, metro transportation systems, regulate health insurance and electricity rates, and much else equally poorly, do not do much better with education.  In many cases, they also spend far more money on education than they tell us they spend on it as I reported in this post on Washington, D.C. public schools.  According to a study released on 10 March 2010 by Adam Schaeffer with the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom entitled They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools, this problem of under-reporting the real cost of public school educational expenses is very widespread.  He examines the reported spending and the real spending per pupil for six metropolitan regions, including the five largest for K-12 public schools.  He also compares the cost of the K-12 public schools to an estimate of the cost for private schools in that metropolitan area.  The results are very enlightening and offer a sound reason for hope that we can convince the People that government-run education is a very bad deal indeed.

The Cato Institute report compiled public school K-12 costs for the central city school district, for the highest income adjacent school district and for the lowest income adjacent school district.  I have complied a table to condense the most important of the results found by Adam Schaeffer in the following table:

The public school districts under-reported the true cost of public education per pupil anywhere from 3% to 151%.  Only the low-income North Chicago school district did a faithful job of reporting their real expenditures, though the low-income district in the Phoenix area of Deer Valley at 13% and the low-income district in the Washington, D.C. area of Prince George's County at 17% were much more accurate than most in their reporting.  Los Angeles city school district was the worst: they spent more than 2.5 times as much as they claimed to spend per pupil!  The other districts spent between 22 and 85% more than they reported spending.  It turns out that many voters when told about the difference in real spending from what they thought was being spent per student were very upset.  They indicated that they were not willing be taxed so much as they were for the purpose of spending so much.

Equally interesting as the great deception of the People about the amount spent on public education, is the fact that the public education is clearly no bargain compared to private education.  The public school districts spent between 21% and 201% more than the local private schools!  In 8 out of the 18 public school districts examined, the public schools spent more than 100% more than (twice as much) did the local private schools per pupil.  Only the Houston school districts and the low-income school districts of Phoenix, Los  Angeles, and Washington, D.C., were less than 50% more expensive than the local private schools and all but one of them was one-third or more higher in costs.

Now, I am pretty sure that these private schools are generally offering as good or better educations than the public schools.  I am very sure that if they spent as much as the public schools do per pupil, most private schools would offer a substantially better education.  It would seem very clear that the taxpayers in many of these examined school systems could be convinced that a voucher system that allowed them to send their children to a private school instead of the public school money-eater would be preferable both for providing their children a better education and to save the local tax district a huge amount of money, as they shut down more and more of their schools.  Indeed, even the taxpayers with no children to educate would clearly be better off.

Some will argue that many of the private schools are associated with religious groups.  Indeed, in a country in which the taxpayer has to pay for these very expensive public schools and then has to shell out a substantial amount of money for a private school, there is likely to be another motivation of the effort and commitment, such as a strong belief of some kind.  But, if public policy allows a healthy voucher system, the market for private schools will expand greatly.  Many secular schools will be established, as will be schools with strong arts programs or strong science programs.  The competition to provide good educations at reasonable prices will produce many more good schools that people can afford more readily than the bloated socialist holding cells we call schools today.

So, when the topic of public education comes up in your school district, do not feel bashful about informing your conversant that public schools are ridiculously expensive and provide a poor education compared to what a private school can and will provide.  Let's get the People to demand a shift from government-run schools to private schools, where the parents will once again have a say in the education of their children and the taxpayers will have some relief.  The public schools are just one more case of the gullible being taken for a ride by government.

Nationalizing the Student Body

In the same gargantuan bill that established ObamaCare, the federal government once again used the fascist socialist model of gaining control by effectively nationalizing college students.  They did this by putting all student loans under a government monopoly.  The theory is the time-honored one of:  "He who controls the money, controls everything."  Of course in the short-run, this just means that whereas a student could approach many private lenders, he can now approach only one lender, the federal government.  That lender will even allow him not to pay back the loan, if the student takes a government job after graduating.  This reveals the government's bias against the private sector, which is merely tasked with the need to be productive enough that the government can suck enough of private sector blood to continue on happily in its bloated growth.

Why did this nationalization of student loans wind up in the ObamaCare bill?  Of course, in part just because Obama can usually count on the young who have been indoctrinated in the socialist viewpoint throughout a public school education and then again in college and he believes in making his followers believe they have been rewarded.  He knew ObamaCare was unpopular and wanted to be sure it would be popular with his loyal base of young people.  But, perhaps it was also in the bill due to simple logic.  ObamaCare nationalizes the bodies of every American by making all Americans dependent upon the federal government for all of their medical care.  The government monopoly of student loans, in the face of extremely high college costs, nationalizes the student body of every college in America.  So, the common issue of the bill was the nationalization of bodies, both student bodies and everyone else's as well.

The first great goal of socialists in America was to nationalize education.  The major American socialists of the 1800s and early 1900s worked very hard to have the government take over education in America.  Then, they worked very hard to enlarge school districts so that very few of the student's parents were on the school boards or would know the people personally who were on them.  The socialists wanted the controlling school boards to be distant from the parents, because the parents were not a good influence on their children, since most parents were not socialists.  The purpose of the schools was to engineer the students into socialists.  It was to design their behavior, direct their emotions, and to fully indoctrinate the students in socialism.  As the government-run schools escaped the effective control of the parents, this plan could be implemented more and more fully.  One of the most important further requirements was that the professional commitment to teaching children to think for themselves on the part of true educators had to be broken.  This was done with the unionization of teachers, which had the added advantage that union leaderships were full of socialists.

The need to put as many scientists as possible into the war effort in WWII, started the heavy funding of research for scientists at universities and colleges which continues to this day.  Along the way, other academics drooled with envy at the funding the scientists were getting.  The government realized that it had gained advantages by winning over the allegiance of many scientists to the idea of a growing federal government by controlling their funding for research.  The government had long exceeded its powers as granted by the Constitution, so it would be a disaster if the learned academics in colleges and universities were to start calling the government on this usurpation of power.  So, it became very clear that it would be wise for the government to provide taxpayer money to researchers in disciplines such as economics, history, sociology, psychology, and other fields to get them on board with an ever-growing government.  This would happen because these academics would want more and more money and a government would have to be growing and taking more and more in taxes to give it to them.  Besides, those researchers who did not praise big government, could be cut off from research funding.  Academics, not normally known for their bravery, could be mostly counted upon to toe the line.  They have done so.

Am I being unfair in saying that academics are not normally brave?  I do not think so.  First, the current crop of academics has among its older members the Baby Boomers.  This is my generation.  I know something about them.  They protested the Vietnam War when they were in college.  Now, there were valid reasons for protesting the use of the draft in the Vietnam War, but they rarely did so for the right reasons.  Most college students were really, really frightened at the prospect of going to Vietnam.  So much so, that they jumped right on board with the flimsy and false arguments of the organized socialists who were the organizers of almost all of the college protests of the day.  Unusually large numbers of this generation hated private enterprise as part of the so-called military-industrial complex.  These fearful people also felt an aversion to the risks of the free enterprise system.  This in turn, drew them into the belief that there was something wrong with the profit motive, so they could claim that they were averse to Capitalism for moral reasons, rather than fear.  Soon, they were largely inclined to sneer at anything to do with the private sector and sing their own praise as being more nobly engaged in the education of young people and to sing the praises of government leaders as well, provided they were not in the Defense Department.  This group, due to its size and the rapid growth of colleges in that era, soon was able to determine which other faculty were hired and then which would be granted tenure.  Almost every department on almost every campus was soon full of liberals and only the socialist viewpoint was ever to be heard.  This proved to be of immense value to the growth of governments in America.

Further evidence of cowardice is the insistence of college faculties in silencing any real dissention on campuses.  Brave academics would welcome debate, but today's academics try to shut it down and when challenged to debate, they most generally refuse to do so.  They have even developed extensive speech codes to limit debate by anointing politically correct speech.  A very blatant example of their cowardice was the very widespread acceptance on almost every American campus of the government-accepted theory of catastrophic man-made global warming.  This has long been a hypothesis of at least dubious standing and for several years now has been clearly wrong.  Any good scientist reviewing the evidence, whether a climate scientist by profession or not, can clearly see that its central theory that CO2 emissions by man have caused a uniquely large increase in temperature in the late 20th Century with catastrophic circumstances is wrong.  Where have the many academic scientists been who should have vociferously put this failed hypothesis to rest?  There has been hardly a peep from almost any college, but for the very occasional professor emeritus, who the socialist controlled universities had less power to intimidate.

Once the universities were well-controlled by these socialist faculty members, they could put pressure on the student bodies to become socialists in many ways.  First, the faculty only presented the socialist viewpoint at most colleges.  Second, it is much easier to agree with a teacher and regurgitate his line of thinking on exams and in assignments than it is to take off on your own as a student and present an opposing viewpoint.  Third, opposing viewpoints were and are usually graded more harshly.  Fourth, the egalitarianism of socialism resulted in huge inflation of grades so there was little in grades that could be used to distinguish students and this same grade inflation made it more risky not to agree and to be penalized with a lower grade.  Fifth, scholarships and awards are made to students who are good socialists and the criteria are blatantly socialist.  These awards are more important because there is no differentiation in grades.

Affirmative action provided the socialists and government still more power by forcing universities to take under-qualified students, who then were beholdened to government.  But, this still did not make the remainder of the student body sufficiently beholdened.  Meanwhile, the costs of colleges, fed by huge sums of federal research money and the huge increase in faculty salaries and benefits that came with that, kept rising very rapidly.  The colleges could not get these faculty members to teach classes without paying them enough to lure them away from their research efforts a few moments of each week.  Universities had generally become cost plus operations with little need to operate efficiently.  Besides, very many were run by governments and had all the customary efficiency of a government agency such as the DMV.  But, this put a huge strain on students and/or their families to pay the costs.  So, government-guaranteed loans from private banks came into being.  The next logical step in gaining complete control of the students was for the government to create the student loan monopoly, which it just did.

Now, almost every college student will be beholdened to government.  If any college graduate ever argues against socialism, the socialist opponent will yell "Hypocrite, did you not benefit from socialism by taking a student loan to graduate from college?"  What is more, the ready availability of student loans will reduce what little pressure there has been on the colleges to hold down expenses, so tuition and fees for students will continue to go up much faster than costs in the private sector.  This means that the government-run colleges and those private schools so beholdened to the government will become a larger and larger part of the drain on the hated private sector.  The fact that graduates will be able to have their student loans forgiven if they take a government job, will ensure that many graduates will clamber for more government jobs.  Why not?  The pay is twice that in the private sector, the benefits are out-of-this-world, and your huge student loan debts will be forgiven.  Who would go into the private sector under these conditions?  So, the college-educated elite who are supposed to direct the growth of socialism and the corresponding growth of government will be pushed all the more monolithically toward socialism and bigger and bigger government.

Do not kid yourself.  This is an absolutely insidious plan.  It fits perfectly well on the plane with the use of the health care insurance mandate to nationalize our bodies and make us dependent upon government for the very continuance of our lives, at least once we ever have a life-threatening disease or a cause of great pain.  The socialists' fascination with the control of education will be complete when they start using this monopoly on student loans as reason to assure that students are getting a good education with the money the government is committing.  Yes, the government will in time evaluate the colleges and universities the students are choosing and will deny those it does not like money by not loaning money to the students who would go there.  This will be the end of dissenting colleges and universities.  Then, the government will also exercise choice in which students to allow to have student loans.  Those who are not socialists and who view government with great distrust, will be weeded out.  This is a very powerful tool for a socialist federal government to develop as time goes on.  It will too.  It is inevitable.

Unless we kill this voracious monster and recreate the limited government of our Constitution whose purpose was to make the sole job of the federal government the protection of the equal, sovereign, and unalienable rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  We must keep socialism from killing our very individuality and our individual rights.  We must start by repealing this particularly insidious ObamaCare and Student Loan Monopoly Bill.  And then, we must start dismantling the federal, state, and local government controls on the education of young Americans.  We have to eliminate their indoctrination as socialists, or this fight for our individual rights will have to be desperately fought with each generation and will eventually be lost.

The only savior will be a return to private education with professional educators, rather than blue collar unionists. These teachers must be committed to teaching Americans about our Founding Fathers and the American Revolution and why they fought for the American principle that each individual has an equal, sovereign, and unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  They must teach about the real purpose of our Constitution.  They must be knowledgeable about how Capitalism allows every individual to exercise his individuality and how it has allowed an incredible richness of life for almost every American.  They must also be able to tell the sad story of the many failures of socialism, whether of communism or fascism, or any combination of the two.  Then, and only then, might we be able to concentrate on living our own lives without undue concern that the monster of tyrannical government will squash us once again.

Obama's Change: Growing Government into Bankruptcy

When Obama promised CHANGE he intended to:

• Rid Americans of their individual rights, while laughing at the Constitution as just quaint
• Rid Americans of their health care choices and responsibilities
• Rid private employers of employees
• Make bankrupt Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac agencies of the federal government
• Rid private lenders of all future student loan business
• Rid hard working and productive Americans of much more of their earnings
• Rid the owners of GM and Chrysler of their investments
• Force banks and financial companies to take federal loans whether they need them or not
• End any concept of federal government fiscal responsibility
• Saddle the states with huge increases in already unpayable Medicaid bills
• Enlarge all governments and load them up with even more union employees with high salaries and sky-high benefits
• Bring Social Security to spending more in 2010 than its tax revenue
• Drag innovation in medicine to a painful crawl
• Induce doctors to retire early
• Increase medical costs with new taxes
• Increase taxes on investors so they will have less to invest in America's future
• Increase the size of the IRS
• Saddle employers with more tax and health insurance collection and paperwork duties
• Increased fuel costs due to drilling restrictions and increased ethanol use requirements
• Increased fuel costs due to declaring CO2 a pollutant
• Load tons of federal debt upon our children and grandchildren
• Print and spend money so recklessly that some are advocating a VAT lead weight on business

And these are just some of the changes which he has brought about with about 2.7 years left in office.  He is a very accomplished man in bringing about so many changes in such a short time.  He is a whirlwind of change and these changes are as useful as the change brought on to a small town when a tornado passes through it.  As I warned over and over during the presidential campaign, change is more often destructive than it is good, unless that change is planned and carried through by rational, knowledgeable, and wise people.  When a society is working as well as the American society did, change is best undertaken with much deliberation and consensus.  Change by madmen who scoff at the Constitution and do not read the 1,000 to 2,700 page legislative bills they vote for, will never be good.  Indeed, the tornado-like mass destruction is extremely evident.

Douglas Elmendorf, head of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), yesterday said:

U.S. fiscal policy is unsustainable, and unsustainable to an extent that it can't be solved through minor changes.  It's a matter of arithmetic.

Numbers from the Treasury Department on the fiscal year 2010 federal budget deficit are staggering (from an e-mail from Grassfire Nation):

• A record $220.9 billion deficit in February alone
• For every dollar in taxes and other revenues the federal government took in, the government SPENT $3.05.
• Five-month deficit total: $651.6 billion, more than 10 percent higher than last year's record.
• The five-month total is larger than any YEAR in American history prior to 2009.
• The FY2010 budget deficit is now projected to be $1.56 trillion AFTER stealing from the Social Security Trust fund.
• The CBO projects that interest payments on the debt will total $916 BILLION annually by the end of the decade.

If the U.S. is paying out $916 billion in interest on the debt each year by 2020, who will be crazy enough to loan the federal government any money?  When Douglas Elmendorf says the U.S. fiscal policy is unsustainable, that is a nice way of saying the U.S. government will be bankrupt.  Do you suppose the Chinese government will put the U.S. government into a conservatorship, as the U.S. government recently did to Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac?  The federal government put them under a new agency in Washington, D.C. I suspect the Chinese government agency the American federal government will be put under will be in Peking.  Since Obama likes communism and Marxism so much, do you suppose this was his planned end point for the transformation of America and its People?  Clearly they would not accept communism given the choice outright, but as the means to be rescued from bankruptcy, Obama figures we will have to accept communist rule.  Since he thinks there is no such thing as American Exceptionalism, why not make us all peasants under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party?

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Full Faith and Credit of the USA

Robert Romano posted an interesting article on the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the U.S. debt on 7 April 2010.  Romano is the Senior Editor of the ALG News Bureau.  ALG is Americans for Limited Government, which is an organization doing good work for the cause of American liberty.  I will summarize the most interesting points in his article below.

Congress placed the government secured entities (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under federal government conservatorship in 2008 because they were effectively bankrupt.  Congress formed the Federal Housing Finance Agency to manage their sorry financial mess, which Congress had long worked hard to foster.  In June 2008, their combined debt was $6.6 trillion, of which $4.7 trillion was mortgage-backed securities.  Congressman Scott Garrett asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner why this debt taken on by the federal government had not been added to the national debt.  The U.S. debt of $12.6 trillion should really be $19.2 trillion and this would result in the downgrading of U.S. debt due to excessive risk.  There is quite a song and dance going on here while trying to avoid this.

Geithner says this corporate debt is not the same as U.S. Treasuries and should not be considered sovereign debt.  He says, "By statute, all obligations and securities issued by GSEs must include a statement that makes clear that such obligations and securities are not guaranteed by the United States and do not constitute a debt or obligation of the United States."  But, he also says the "Treasury is committed to supporting the GSEs while in conservatorship and to ensuring that the GSEs have sufficient capital to meet their debt obligations and honor their guarantees."  When Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were nationalized, the FHFA director James Lockhart told Congress that "the conservatorship and the access to credit from the U. S. Treasury provide an explicit guarantee to existing and future debt holders of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac."  It seems clear that when Congress nationalized the GSEs, the earlier statute that their obligations were not guaranteed by the federal government, had to be superseded or inherently contradicted.

Foreign investors held $1.5 trillion of the $4.7 trillion in mortgage-backed securities.  In June 2007, the last an accounting by nation was performed, China held $376 billion, Japan $228 billion, Russia $75 billion, Luxembourg held $39 billion, Belgium $33 billion, Britain $28 billion, and Middle Eastern national funds are also big holders.  Many of these nations apparently said they would not buy Treasury bonds to support the U.S. national debt if the government did not rescue them from the bankrupt mortgage-backed securities they held.  The federal government has since bought up $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed toxic security debt.  The Treasury will not say whose toxic securities they bought, but they only dealt with primary dealers who could directly deal with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  When the TARP program was put together, the Treasury was forbidden to purchase the mortgage-backed securities of foreign central banks.  But, it appears likely that Geithner has done just that with paper which is indeed backed by the explicit backing of the United States.  What else could he have paid the primary dealers for the toxic securities with?

This is just me again:  Our real national debt is clearly much greater than the $12.6 trillion figure we are told in a huge lie that it is.  There is still much more hidden debt than just that of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac also.

Some Gutless Republican Senators on ObamaCare Repeal

There are reports that Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee says that the repeal of ObamaCare is "just not going to happen."  Senator John Cornyn of Texas says the Republicans should try to change the "misplaced priorities of Democrats."  The milquetoast U.S. Chamber of Commerce is once again showing its yellow stripe by advising a "more effective approach to minimizing its harmful impacts."  And Paul Kirk, the Republican Senate candidate in Illinois, who was once strong on repealing the ObamaCare bill, is now easing off.  These are the Summer Soldiers of the second American Revolution.  If they do not stiffen their backbones, we need to find replacements for them.  We must have Winter Soldiers who will hold the line when the tyrant's forces charge with fixed bayonets, as the socialists will do.

Anything less then the complete repeal of this nightmare bill for our liberties is acceptable.  This is a matter of the most dire consequence for our ownership of our very bodies, the health of our loved ones, the ability of our nation to pay its bills, and the avoidance of further crushing taxes on us as individuals, such as the proposed VAT tax.  Any Republican who is not enthusiastically on-board with the Repeal the Bill Revolution is a roadblock to patriots and those who believe in the most fundamental American principle of individual rights.  These militia men who flee before the first round is fired in the battle must be bulldozed out of the way with extreme contempt.

Check Out PJTV, Please

PJTV is a relatively new source of information on the Internet with a strong individual rights message and much good reporting.  Bill Whittle, Steven Green, Scott Ott, Joe Hicks, Yaron Brook, Andrew Klavan, Crowder, Dana Loesch, Dr. Peter Weiss, Glenn Reynolds, Sonja Schmidt, and Roger L. Simon are among the many commentators and reporters on PJTV.  This is a group with a pretty consistent pro-individual rights and free market message.  I really appreciate their work.

Here is a message from Bill Whittle in his Afterburner program on why and how we should support the Tea Party movement and the general re-awakening of the people for more limited government and for our individual rights.  This is not a typical program, but it does display the viewpoint of PJTV pretty well.  Of course, most commentaries are on a more specific current issue.  Most are lively, fun, and many are funny.

I hope you will watch a number of their programs and that if you like them, you will subscribe and support this very wonderful attempt to make a more libertarian viewpoint available to the People.  I have been impressed with its quality and the rate of expansion has been quite surprising.  That is probably because it is meeting a great need.  The Tea Party movement has fed a desire in many people for a new viewpoint on our freedoms and government, and PJTV is providing that.  Fox News is at least not consistently anti-individual rights and anti-free markets, but its reporters and commentators offer a mix of many viewpoints.  This is not bad, but those of us who understand the real issues and want our government to pursue a consistent policy of protection for the equal, sovereign, and unalienable rights of the individual will find a TV news-like supplement such as PJTV a more concentrated and consistent source of the news of interest to us.

Net Neutrality Enforcement by the FCC and Free Speech

Net Neutrality is a term that brings back memories of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requiring that conservative as well as liberal viewpoints had to be aired on television networks, local TV stations, and radio stations after the events of the late 1960s led many to believe the country was about to fall into the hands of socialists.  Ayn Rand, perhaps due to her early experience with a country having been taken over by socialists when she was a child in the Soviet Union, was in favor of this requirement as a last gasp attempt to prevent a socialist takeover in the United States.  This was one of the few major issues that I disagreed with her on.  While the socialists were hurting the country, I did not think they were on the verge of taking the USA over and putting it under their control.  I thought that Americans who believed in the principle of individual rights still had sufficient means to make use of their free speech rights.  I thought it was dangerous to do anything that would interfere with free speech and set a precedent for such interference in the future.  This turned out to be the case.

Moving to the present and the recent past, we have heard a great many complaints from the socialists associated with Obama and the Democrat Congress about people with viewpoints in opposition to theirs.  This atmosphere of control over speech by the left has long been the rule on most college campuses.  An intricate matrix of politically correct viewpoints are allowed and those with viewpoints outside this matrix are called bigots, rednecks, NASCAR people, trailer trash, and racists.  Students not on board are threatened with expulsion and faculty with a failure to gain tenure.  The socialists clearly do want this same politically correct culture of restricted free speech to be transferred into every American's life.  In many companies, particularly large ones with considerable government business, political correctness rules the day.  Obama's and his comrade's comments about Fox News have not only expressed dislike of that organization's multivariate viewpoints, but have sometimes suggested a desire to limit what it can say with regulations and controls.  Other of his friends have expressed a desire to control what is said on the Internet.  This is hardly surprising given that the left, wherever it has free reign, as it does on most college campuses, has always lost its interest in free speech.  In fact, no socialist country ever tolerates free speech in the way we have traditionally in the United States.

With this as background, let us consider what Glenn Beck has to say in the video clip of a part of his program here.

While much of what he says is true, some perspective is needed.  First, the primary issue of Net Neutrality is whether the companies that operate the lines that provide us with our Internet information should continue to be able to manage the flow of data to optimize the overall service.  As is the case with all resources, bandwidth on these Internet lines is finite.  It is not always the case that everyone hooked up to such a line can upload and download as much data as they wish.  The lines sometimes become overloaded.  The most vociferous and determined company opposing Net Neutrality is Comcast.  This is probably because Comcast has less bandwidth than, say, does Verizon in many areas.  They have no choice but to limit user access in some way.  Allegations have been made that they limited that access in ways that gave their own content an advantage over the content of others.  This may be true, but it is not clear that the issue was one of their trying to cut off socialist or conservative viewpoints from their subscribers.  Some companies, especially those who dealt with large files that they want to send to their customers and who take in large files sent to them from their customers, do not like the fact that Comcast sometimes did not allow a large file to be uploaded at a particular time when they had too little bandwidth to meet the demand.  All the other major Internet line providers also assert that they need to manage their bandwidth also, since all of them have finite bandwidth.  The Net Neutrality proponents do not want any special restrictions aimed at them, despite the fact that they produce many large files that rapidly fill the finite bandwidth of the Internet provider's lines.

Some socialist organizations have banded together with the large file handling point-to-point companies in favor of Net Neutrality.  Why?  Probably because they simply want to get the power of the FCC expanded to give them the power to regulate the Internet.  And yes, they no doubt do want the FCC to later use this power to regulate the Internet to control the viewpoints expressed on the Internet.  That is not the immediate issue being addressed at this time, however.  These socialist organizations are also trying to establish their expertise on such Internet matters and gain publicity.

Of course, we should remain alert to any increase in the powers of the FCC in any case.  It has much too much power now and it does have a lot of potential for the future misuse of that power specifically to allow those in power to squelch viewpoints at variance with their own.  The FCC has always tended to act in restraint of the free markets and this has never been a good thing.

Fortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. ruled on 6 April 2010 that the FCC has failed to show that it has the authority under Title 1 of the Communications Act of 1934 to tell broadband Internet providers how they could manage their finite bandwidth issues.  At least, the FCC could not do it the way they were attempting to do it.  Being a grasping federal agency always looking to expand its power, the FCC will try and try again to gain control over the Internet, but it has not yet found the formula for doing so.

Soaking the People in Ethanol

In 2007, then President Bush and the Democrat Congress mandated the annual sale of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022.  The rationale offered the public was that ethanol would decrease our use of oil from abroad and help reduce air pollution.  Both of these rationales have been shown to be without justification.  The mandate would then have been withdrawn, if its real purpose were as stated.  But, the real reason is that some political entrepreneurs, who disdain the rough and tumble of the free market, are being heavily subsidized with a $0.45 per gallon blender's tax credit.  The 52 producers known as "Growth Energy" have requested the EPA to increase the 10% ethanol blend for our vehicles to 15% this summer.  To meet the insane Democrat Congress and Bush mandate coming due in 2022, the EPA is likely to approve this massive consumer robbery.  The Growth Energy group will receive an additional $16 billion subsidy at taxpayer's expense.

It gets worse.  Of  course.  We consumers also get suckered for:

• A gas mileage reduction of 5.3%.
• Higher fuel cost per gallon.
• Increased repair costs for vehicle engines not designed for 15% ethanol.
• Added costs to gas stations and storage facilities as they replace tanks and lines unable to handle gasoline with 15% ethanol, which is passed on to drivers.
• Corn costs higher by $0.18 per bushel.
• Wheat more expensive by $0.15 per bushel.
• Soybeans more expensive by $0.28 per bushel.
• Other crops that can be grown where corn is grown will be more expensive.
• Hogs, chickens, and cattle prices will rise along with meat from them.

If Obama and the Democrat Congress cared about the People having jobs and about their welfare, they would repeal this dumb law.  But, they apparently want the campaign contributions from Growth Energy companies and corn farmers more.  The hypocrisy could not be more obvious.

Michelle Obama Says Kenya is Obama's Home Country

Things just keep popping up that make one wonder why Obama's past has been so shrouded in mystery. Early in the talk below, Michelle Obama says Kenya is Barack Obama's home country. Watch the video of her talk here.

IMF Projects Some Out-of-This-World National Debts

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has produced the debt predictions for the year 2014 given below.  The chart is from the 27 March - 2 April 2010 issue of The Economist.  The bar graph plot is actually of the increase in the national debt from 2007 to the projected debt of 2014, which is given in the small boxes on the right as a percent of the nations GDPs.

The United States IMF-projected increase in the national debt from 2007, when the Democrats were in their first year of controlling Congress, looks to be about 47% between then and 2014.  Both Japan and Great Britain will have added even more to their national debts, but note that the U.S. has recently been much more profligate in its overspending than even such stalwart socialist countries as France, Germany, and Italy.  While Japan's projected 2014 national debt will guarantee its sluggish growth for decades as it struggles under an unimaginable debt 246% greater than its GDP, the projected national debt of the U.S. at 108% of GDP will make us stagger a good deal also.  We will wind up with a national debt worse than that of Britain, France, and Germany, each of which we recognize as irresponsible socialist countries.  What does this make the U.S.?

Kudos belong to Canada, which has been much wiser in managing its economy throughout this recession.  It is increasing its national debt by only about 5% from 2007 to 2014 and its 2014 national debt will be a mere 69% of its GDP.  That should position Canada for solid growth in the near future and leave Canadians much less burdened with debt and the interest on that debt than the wayward Americans to the south.  It looks as though I would be wise to shift some of my retirement investment to Canada, where it may be safer and have better prospects for growth.

Earthquake Damage and Deaths in Haiti and Chile

The recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile caused massive damage in both locations, but the scale of the catastrophe in Haiti was much greater than that in Chile.  The Haiti earthquake was of magnitude 7.0 and between 217,000 and 230,000 people died.  In Chile, the earthquake was a magnitude of 8.8, or about 500 times more powerful than the quake in Haiti.  About 500 people died, largely due to a tsunami.  Many news stories noted that the quality of construction in Haiti is very low, while that in Chile is much better.  The poverty of the Haitians is usually the simple reason given for the low quality of construction.  Sometimes, it was noted that part of the reason for their poverty is due to a lack of freedom and a government that is highly corrupt and grasping.

For some time, I have been reading Thomas Sowell's book Applied Economics, Thinking Beyond Stage One.  It is not a hard read, it is just that I scatter books all around the many places I might find myself when I have a moment to read.  This book was in one of those many places.  Generally, I am concurrently reading about 12 to 15 books, many of them only a page or four at a time before I am back in motion.  This book was copyrighted in 2004, so he does not address the Haitian earthquake of 2010.  But, he does address one of the reasons why Haiti is so grindingly poor.  The last chapter of the book discusses The Economic Development of Nations.  Sowell notes:

Another of the functions of government that affects economic development is its role in providing property rights -- or failing to provide property rights.  Many Third World countries suffer from the fact that, while property rights may exist, they are not realistically available to vast numbers of people.  In some of these countries, a majority of the economic activity takes place "off the books" in the underground economy.  For example, most of the housing in Egypt and Peru has been built illegally, whether because of numerous restrictions and red tape that impede building housing legally, or because of costly legal processes which poor people are unable to afford.  In Egypt, where 4.7 million homes have been built illegally, legally registering a lot on state-owned desert land requires 77 bureaucratic procedures at 31 agencies -- and these procedures can take five years or more.  In Haiti, it can take 19 years to acquire property rights.  In some countries, bribes are necessary to get officials to expedite legal processes, and often the poor are unable to offer a sufficient bribe.

Now imagine yourself an average Haitian citizen.  No, you cannot do that.  That is impossible.  OK, just do your best to imagine that you are very poor and do not have sufficient means to bribe the Haitian government officials to speed up your quest for property rights for the home or store you want to build.  You also cannot afford to have no home or business for 19 years.  You have to earn a living, however hard in Haiti, and you need a roof over your family's heads.  But, since you have no property rights, no bank is going to give you a mortgage for the building you must build.  Even if you are not too, too poor and you are a rising small businessman, you may not have the money to spare to bribe the officials to get property rights.  If you do not hold the property rights, you cannot afford to sink very much money into building a very sound building.  You would otherwise, but the risk of having the building taken from you after you build it, especially if it is well-built and therefore very desirable, is just too great to put much money into it.  So, everyone builds lousy buildings, which are deathtraps in earthquakes, because you either have insufficient money to build a good building or because you cannot risk it in a building you have no property rights for.

Sowell does discuss how this lack of property rights tends to mire the people of a country lacking property rights in poverty.  This is an important discussion and it is also one made at great length in Hernando de Soto's book The Mystery of Capitalism, Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else.  For the reasons I gave above, it prevents people from building safe buildings also.  It guarantees that a less powerful earthquake in Haiti, with no effective property rights, will kill vast numbers more people than will be killed by a much worse earthquake in Chile, where people have effective property rights.

Natural disasters pick on those who do not and cannot exercise their sovereign individual rights.  Some said Gaia caused the earthquake in Haiti because the earth goddess was angry about the failure of the Copenhagen Meeting to force countries into massive energy use cutbacks.  Danny Glover said the failure at Copenhagen caused the earthquake in Haiti!  But, it would appear that if Gaia was angry about anything, she was angry that the people of Haiti had no effective property rights!

Jim Powell -- Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand: Three Women Who Inspired the Modern Libertarian Movement

I recently read an excellent and remarkably inexpensive book about the Great Depression called FDR's Folly by Jim Powell.  This book is well-organized and really focuses on the essentials of how FDR deepened and lengthened the Great Depression.  There are other books on the Great Depression, but none of those I have read manage to give the scope of the problems as concisely and clearly as this book does.  I intend to obtain more of his books and read them.  Jim Powell is a Senior Fellow at the CATO Institute, whose website just directed me to this interesting article by Jim Powell on the critical roles of three women in greatly slowing the American slide into the morass of socialism.  The article was published by The Freeman and called Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand: Three Women Who Inspired the Modern Libertarian Movement and was written in 1996.  He starts out:

Liberty was in full retreat in the early 1940s. Tyrants oppressed or threatened people on every continent. Western intellectuals whitewashed mass murderers like Joseph Stalin, and Western governments expanded their power with Soviet-style central planning. Fifty million people were killed in the war that raged in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The United States, seemingly the last hope for liberty, was drawn into it.

Established American authors who defended liberty were a dying breed. H.L. Mencken had turned away from bitter politics to write his memoirs, while others like Albert Jay Nock and Garet Garrett were mired in pessimism.

Amidst the worst of times, three bold women banished fear. They dared to declare that collectivism was evil. They stood up for natural rights, the only philosophy which provided a moral basis for opposing tyranny everywhere. They celebrated old-fashioned rugged individualism. They envisioned a future when people could again be free. They expressed a buoyant optimism which was to inspire millions.

All were outsiders who transcended difficult beginnings. Two were immigrants. One was born in frontier territory not yet part of the United States. They struggled to earn money as writers in commercial markets dominated by ideological adversaries. All were broke at one time or another. They endured heartaches with men—one stayed in a marriage which became sterile, and two became divorced and never remarried.

These women who had such humble beginnings—Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand—published major books during the same year, 1943: The Discovery of Freedom, The God of the Machine, and The Fountainhead, respectively. The women, recalled journalist John Chamberlain, “with scornful side glances at the male business community, had decided to rekindle a faith in an older American philosophy. There wasn’t an economist among them. And none of them was a Ph.D.” Albert Jay Nock declared that, “They make all of us male writers look like Confederate money. They don’t fumble and fiddle around—every shot goes straight to the centre.”

If you have read this introduction, I am sure you are now hooked.  Read the rest of  Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand: Three Women Who Inspired the Modern Libertarian Movement and enjoy yourself.

I am less a fan of Lane's The Discovery of Freedom, Man's Struggle Against Authority (13 customer reviews on Amazon), than I am of Isabel Paterson's God of the Machine (6 customer reviews on Amazon) and, of course, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (with 1,012 reader reviews on Amazon) and Atlas Shrugged (2,028 reviews on Amazon!).  The latter three books are great reads and fascinating books.  I find Lane's The Discovery of Freedom interesting for its historical role, useful for some information on a period of time in Europe and the U.S., but strained in the recurring analogy of freedom with energy.  The analogy is useful and true, but its overuse throughout the book bore a weight on me that was just a bit too much about half way through the book.  She is also less clear-minded about many issues than Paterson or Rand and she is too religious in her thinking to be as satisfying.

The Real Employment Situation in March 2010

Each month since December 2009, I have been providing a simple analysis of the actual employment numbers in comparison with our growing population.  For unemployment to go down in a meaningful way, the actual number of jobs must increase at a rate faster than the population of working age Americans does.  In the media, we have heard month after month that fewer jobs were lost lately than earlier in the recession and this was good news.  To an extent it is, but to keep things in perspective we need to remember that the American private sector, when not dragged down by government, usually creates many jobs each and every month.  Back in January of 2000 the U.S. economy was operating at about as full employment as it ever does.  It is useful to compare the employment situation since then with that time.  Employment was so enticing then that the number of people with jobs or seeking employment was 67.49% of the total work age population.  Assuming that nothing in the country has fundamentally changed in our work ethic or that there is no reason more women or men are staying home to care for children other than a lack of work, we can calculate how many jobs we are missing relative to January 2000.  In a long recession, many people who want to work give up looking for work, so the usual unemployment number means little.

The table below provides the employment numbers based on the Household Data of Table A-1 from the March Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Report.  I use the numbers which are not seasonally adjusted, since I do not have full and complete trust in the seasonal adjustments and there is something strange in saying we have more people employed than actually are employed.  Besides, my January 2000 benchmark is also not seasonally adjusted and January is one of the months for which the seasonal adjustment adds employment to the actual case.

The unemployment rate in March was very slightly better than that in February, which in turn had been very, very slightly better than that in January.  The seasonally adjusted rate was claimed to be 9.7%.  Nonetheless, there was a larger increase in the number of people employed in March than there had been in February.  Unfortunately, many of those jobs were temporary jobs such as Census jobs and even the private sector is hiring a larger fraction of its hires as temporary hires than it normally does.  We must also remember that many people counted as working here are either working many fewer hours than they want to or they are being paid less than they have been accustomed to being paid.  But, ignoring those very important caveats, the number of missing jobs appears to be much improved.  January was the worst month of the recession for missing jobs.  February had been a micro-improvement on the missing job front, but March made a more substantial improvement.  The creation of jobs has a long ways to go though.  At the end of March we have still not created quite enough jobs to regain the sorry jobs situation of December 2009!

If the economy were robust and free to perform well, there should probably be about 22 million more jobs than there are and many more jobs should be full-time jobs.  It appears that about 13.8% of the jobs desired are missing and that is a generous rendering of the real situation given the many part-time jobs not taken into account here.  Note that while the missing job rate improved, the standard unemployment number did not improve anywhere near as much.  This is because some of the people who long ago gave up on finding a job are returning to the search, now that some net hiring is occurring.

Obama and the Democrats should have a lot of explaining to do for this slow recovery.  The economy would have improved much faster than it has but for the economic uncertainties and the debt these irresponsible fools have created.

Krugman: Advisory Panels will Reduce Costs with Rationing

Paul Krugman, the Progressive economist writing for the New York Times and a major spokesman for the Progressive viewpoint, said on ABC News Sunday during the show "This Week" that

The People on the right, they're simultaneously screaming, 'They're going to send all the old people to death panels,' and 'It's not going to save any money.

The advisory panel which has the ability to make more or less binding judgments on saying this particular expensive treatment actually doesn't do any good medically and so we are not going to pay for it. That is actually going to save quite a lot of money. We don't know how much yet. The CBO gives it very little credit but, but most, most of the health care economists I talk to think that's going be a really, uh a really major cost saving.

Krugman is saying that the ObamaCare program will have to ration medical care more than it presently is rationed in order to save money.  It will do so with advisory panels whose decision is close to that of the Grim Reaper in finality.  The patient and the doctor and the patient's family will have little to no say.  The advisory panel's decision is "more or less binding."  It is dictated.

Note the sleight-of-hand in his first statement in which he concatenates the critic's statement that rationing will occur and it will result in more deaths with their statement that ObamaCare will cost a lot more money and raise premium prices in such a straw-man way as to make the statements appear to be contradictory.  Yet, it is elementary, my dear Krugman, to note that the latter statement of ObamaCare raising net costs does not mean that ObamaCare will not take desperate measures to ration really important care in life and death situations in order to free up money to pay for the much added costs of people seeing a care provider for their many sniffles.

So, as I have noted many times, ObamaCare must ration medical services.  Of course medical services are always rationed.  They used to be rationed by a combination of the ability to pay and the willingness of doctors to provide the truly needy with free or greatly reduced cost care.  Now they will be rationed by an Obama advisory panel of government bureaucrats, who will come between the patient and his family and the patient's doctor, who will not really be the patient's doctor at all, because the doctors will all be owned by the government.  Now, how many times did Obama and his horde of allies tell us that "No one will come between you and your doctor."?????

While it is true that medical care is and always must be rationed, there are very important further differences in which care will be rationed.  ObamaCare will measure its success in the number of doctor visits made to address the sniffles.  There will be many more such visits to the doctor than now because people will not have to pay out of their own pockets for those visits.  They have also committed ObamaCare to much more preventive medicine, even though this also drives cost up, contrary to their claims.  The extra sniffles visits and the preventive medical care will drive the total cost of medical care sharply upward.  At least partially compensating savings will have to be made.  Now, where can savings be made?  Given the ObamaCare commitments, the only time to save lots of money is when most medical expenditure has occurred in the past.  Very rationally, this has been when the care was most needed to extend life and is usually encountered with older people or babies.  Obama and his friends have made it very clear in unguarded moments in the past, that they do not like the fact that so much medical money is spent on babies and the elderly.  They have argued that babies and the elderly have little social value.  They have complained very bitterly about this, but by hiding it in general statements such as Americans spend too much on health care during the recent debates.

So, the advisory panel will look at cost to life extension and future life quality and decide what procedures are worth it, given the budgetary constraints of ObamaCare.  Procedures that were worth the effort to doctors, their patients, and their insurance companies will now be deemed not worth it.  There must be added savings to compensate for the sniffles and the preventive medicine.  The advisory panel will have to decide that grannies and babies who used to be worth the medical effort to save are not now worth the medical effort to save.  However much, the Progressives do not want these panels to be called Death Panels, they are tasked with the necessary job of pulling the plug on granny or your newborn baby.  The plug will have to be pulled much more frequently than we as free people ever allowed it to be pulled.  Now that all value decisions are to be made on a collective basis, your granny and your baby are worth much less in the future than they were in the past.

So, the reality is that just as the Progressive tries to hide the fact he is a Socialist behind a deceiving name implying he is the Angel of the Future Better Society, his Advisory Panel is exactly what Sarah Palin called the Death Panel.  The Advisory Panel serves the purpose of the Grim Reaper, who must cull society of its weak members.  The Weak are Expensive and not Worth it to the Collective.  And on and on, they will insist that we are not fair in identifying them as Socialists.

Our granny may be weak, but when she was our granny, she was loved and she was valuable.  Under ObamaCare, our granny is just a nationalized wee little bit of the Collective.  She is no longer your granny.  She is old and weak and not much regarded by the Collective.  Granny is now very expendable.  So is your newborn baby, if your baby has a serious health problem.  Get used to it.  Or, man the barricades and fight as you have never fought before to save your granny and your future babies!

This is not the time for Summer Soldiers, this is the crisis that can only be met by Winter Soldiers!  We must stand for the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  We must realize that our individual rights and our individual values mean nothing to any too powerful government.  They never have in all of history.  Our Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution knew this very well.  They gave us a Constitution which tightly constrained the federal government with very limited powers in order to protect our individual rights and values.  Our federal government has pushed and pushed to expand its powers far, far beyond those given to it in this wonderful Constitution.  The People have not stopped them in this expansion of government power to this time.  Will you finally become the Winter Soldier for Freedom to save your granny and your future baby?  If you will not, you consent to their being expendable.