Pisaturo: Obama Invests in People to Own Them

Ron Pisaturo has just made an excellent post entitled Policies of Obama Match His Socialist Rhetoric.  The very best part of this post is the final paragraphs where he discusses Obama's idea of investing in people so that government will own the productivity of the most productive Americans:

When Obama speaks of the government ‘investing’, he is of course perverting the meaning of the word; he is really spending wealth confiscated from others. But there is a sinister way in which his use of the word “investing’ is revealing and apt: the government is ‘investing’ in contrast to ‘lending’. When a creditor makes a loan, the creditor obtains a promise to repay the loan with interest; in contrast, when an investor makes an investment, the investor obtains ownership and a share of the profits.

Since, according to Obama, the government ‘invests’ in you—by paying for your schooling, etc.—the government expects not a repayment of a loan to you, but rather a share of the profits in you. For the most productive among us, that share is now more than half of all that you make; and that share is growing as the government’s socialist/fascist agenda expands. Moreover, the government—in keeping with the fascist version of socialism—expects in effect to own the majority of ‘voting stock’ in the ‘business’ of your life, deciding what you must or must not produce, whom you must hire or fire or work for, to whom you must sell, where you must and must not be located, and what methods of production you must and must not use. That is, it is ‘society’, not you, that owns your productive life.

Paradoxically, Obama and other Leftist government officials have recently been pushing to forgive loans to students for college and graduate school; such loans now total a trillion dollars. But if education via government funding is so crucial to an individual’s success, as Obama claims, why is the government willing to let students get off without paying? The answer is that student loans are not socialist/fascist enough for the Left. These loans entail too much individual choice (to request the loan), individual responsibility (to repay the loan), and individual justice (to be responsible to repay only one’s own loan and not the loans to others).

The Leftists think the government can afford to forgive student loans, because the government still has its student ‘investments’. Whenever any particular student in public elementary school or high school—or, for that matter, any particular individual who does not even go to public school—becomes very successful, the socialist/fascist government can claim its lion’s share of the profit on that successful ‘investment’ by taxing that individual’s wealth. One such very successful investment can pay for thousands of failures.

Obama wants to make even more ‘investments’ in us that we can’t refuse. His brazen socialist/fascist rhetoric is part of a campaign for even more ownership of Americans.

These are very perceptive comments and they help us to see deep into the evil mind and heart of the socialist beast that fully intends to be our slave-master.  When Obama uses the word invest, he means it as in a commonly used sense from medieval times:  Obama is investing the castle, as in subjugating the castle.

Do we Americans want productive self-managing Americans to be subjected to work slavery, or do we still have some appreciation for hard work, achievement, and the right to earn a living?  Do we want Americans to either be dependent upon the government beast or to be slaves to the government beast?  Make no mistake -- Obama wants us all to be cast as members of either the dependent or the slave group.  It is unacceptably degrading to be either.

Somebody Else Built My Business!

Speaking in Roanoke, Virginia on Friday, Obama said:



Obama also said:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

 If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

My response:

Somebody else invested the start-up money to buy laboratory equipment.  Somebody else had an income of only $10,000 in all of year 1.  Somebody else paid for a high deductible health plan for myself, my wife, and my three daughters.  Somebody else worked 80-hour weeks.  Somebody else acted as an unpaid tax collector for the federal, state, and local governments.  Somebody else paid real estate taxes and personal property taxes on my laboratory facility and equipment.  Somebody else trained employee after employee.  Somebody else developed thousands of customized materials analysis plans to solve my customers materials problems.  Somebody else slept on a cot into the night to be around to start up one more analysis or two through the night.  Somebody else worked many a 36-hour stretch straight through to meet a deadline.  Somebody else wrote thousands of analytical reports.

Somebody else paid my employees and only took their own pay when income was sufficient to provide it.  Somebody else guaranteed the laboratory lease.  Somebody else took the risk of being sent to jail for the possible violation of some one of thousands of regulations that cannot all be known and understood by any small business owner.  Someone else had to fire the occasional mistaken hire who could not perform his job.  Someone else went with less than a week of vacation time year after year after year.  Someone else worked weekend and holiday after weekend and holiday.

I sure am grateful to that Somebldy Else, even if I was mistaken in thinking it was me.  Now that I know otherwise, I am asking that Somebody Else to step forward and be acknowledged.

But, one thing I am really certain about is this:  I do not owe governments a penny more than they have already received from me and my business.  The first 30% of their spending used on legitimate government functions was worth my while paying, but the remainder was a giant rip-off.  Any penny more that I give government today is money they use to make my life and my family's lives just that much harder.  Much of that money is actually spent to violate more and more of our sovereign individual rights.

It is a good thing that Obama is so blatantly stating what this upcoming election is really about.  He is right that his vision of how our society and our government should operate is very different from that of those of his opposition who believe in the American Principle of a very limited, constitutional government whose only legitimate function is the protection of individual rights.

Those of us who believe in the American Principle readily acknowledge that we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to those Americans who came before us and gave us a government that was at one time limited in scope and largely protective of individual liberty.  We are also grateful for those many productive Americans who made our society wealthy, robust, innovative, founded on mutual trust, reasonably benevolent, and comparatively independent-minded.  We have long had a society that expected Americans to be self-managers of their own lives and to live their lives responsibly.  There are tremendous benefits to all of us from this.  This is a society in which people have largely been able to reap many benefits from their accomplishments and productive work, while providing rich benefits to all of the rest of us in our society.

Our society has largely been based on a robust and rich private sector in which individuals were free to choose their own values and to associate freely with others of their own choice to pursue those values.  We have been a trader society which operates on the principle of voluntary exchanges of ideas, goods, and services.  I, for instance, could not operate without the many vendors who make and supply replacement parts for my laboratory equipment.  I am very grateful to them for offering me that critical service.  But, I also pay them well for providing that equipment and the replacement parts.  My customers pay for my services because I identity the causes of their materials problems and can often suggest how they can prevent the problem.  They are able to make more money because of the service I provide them.  But, our largely private sector society of free trade and associations provides the very mechanisms that allow us to acknowledge in appropriate ways the debts we have to others who supply us with valuable ideas, goods, and services.

Obama wants to eliminate this voluntary trade and association.  He wants to kill the very mechanisms we have for acknowledging the value of the ideas, goods, and services that others in our society offer us.  He wants hordes of government central planners to choose our values for us and impose them upon us using the full force of government.  He says that because we have reaped some benefits from others and from having government, that we owe it to government to build it up even more.  This Obama prescription is the equivalent of the argument that if taking one aspirin for a headache is good, then taking 100 aspirins for that headache is better.  Or if drinking 8 ounces of water now is good, then pouring 10 gallons of water down your throat now is better.  There are many things which have an appropriate level, which when exceeded begin to cause harm and when greatly exceeded cause great harm.  Obama's argument is shear sophistry.  It is wifty logic.

I see that the spell checker does not recognize wifty.  OK, Obama has a great propensity for ditzy logic, which unfortunately works for many Americans today.  Apparently, that is the outcome of government-run schools that want to produce suitable subjects for a socialist tyrannical government.  The biggest ditz of them all, the perfect product of this educational system promoting socialism, is Obama.

Good is done when two or more people agree upon a voluntary exchange.  This may be in business or it may be in a non-commercial endeavor.  What is good for each of us is very different and we work out the complex evaluations of good in accordance with our personal values in the private sector.  While limited government is essential for the purpose of securing our individual rights, larger government can only compromise the individual values of most of us most of the time.  As government grows beyond its legitimate rights protecting function, it necessarily becomes an individual rights violator.  Government cannot do the complex calculus which 310 million Americans do in living and managing their own lives on a completely voluntary basis with others in all things with which government is not involved.  Of course, that assumes that government would even want to do good for each of us if it could.  The history of big governments in all times and places indicates that they do not want to do such good.  Good government, like good doctors, first does no harm.

The Missing Jobs in June 2012 are Unchanged from June 2010

This is the monthly update on the real unemployment situation in the USA based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics June 2012 Household Survey Jobs Data.  The data I will use will not be seasonally adjusted, so we will need to compare June of this year with the unemployment of June 2010 and June 2011 to see if any jobs recovery has occurred.  We will also calculate the number of missing jobs based upon the percentage of the jobs wanted in January 2000 relative to the working age civilian population available for work.  This excludes people in jail or in institutions for those in ill health.

The recent history of missing jobs is given in the following chart:

The number of missing jobs in June 2012 is slightly lower than the number of missing jobs in June 2011, but it is slightly higher than the number of missing jobs in June 2010.  Just as with every other month so far this year, if we compare the number of missing jobs to the same month a year and two years earlier, we find that essentially nothing has changed.

In contrast, the usual unemployment rate of June 2010 was 9.62%.  It fell to 9.32% by June 2011 and still further to the June 2012 rate of 8.43%.  But, this number means little due to the ever-increasing number of discouraged job seekers.  The number of the reported unemployed fell from June 2010 to June 2011 and again to June 2012.  The number of people employed also grew from June to June to June in that time.  However, the population of working age civilians also grew, so that the 12.80% of missing jobs in June 2010 had actually increased by June 2011 to 13.30%, before falling in June 2012 to almost the same percentage as in June 2010 at 12.74%.  A 0.06% decrease in the number of missing jobs in the last two years is no job recovery at all.  This has been the story consistently for the last two and half years.

The policies of the Obama administration are so wrongheaded that they have done great damage to the private sector economy and kept companies from hiring.  Government can do little to effectively increase hiring, but it is excellently capable of destroying jobs and keeping new jobs from being created.  Obama and his Democratic Socialist Party leadership have been working overtime finding ways to make the future ever more uncertain for business and in making labor so expensive that business cannot afford to hire.

John C. Goodman, CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis, recently testified in the House of Representatives that ObamaUncaringTax will increase the cost of an employee by $6/hour.  The EPA is causing sizable increases in our electricity costs and a decrease in electricity reliability, which will cause great harm to many businesses and will reduce the money individuals can spend on other goods and services.  Many state governments are contributing to this problem with their mandates that green energy replace fossil fuels in the electricity supply of their state.  Despite a huge supply of oil and gas in the United States, the Obama administration has done everything it can to prevent the development of new fields on federal land and offshore.  The Dodd-Frank law has created great uncertainty and it has kept financial institutions from loaning to small businesses.  Obama and his union henchmen have interfered with employer-employee relations to the detriment of business.  The looming taxes of the ObamaUncaringTax will take a huge toll, which include a tax surcharge on individuals with higher incomes and on corporations, in addition to the penalty taxes.  This punitive taxation of higher income individuals is not enough for Obama and he wants to eliminate their low percentage decrease part of the Bush tax cuts.  All this is happening in the face of the start of the Baby Boomer retirements and the continued collapse of the housing market.

Of course business is not hiring enough people to get Americans back to work with a jobs recovery to this never-ending recession.  With Obama destroying the business climate, nothing will change and nothing will change Obama.  He is a dyed-in-the-wool socialist.  He is fundamentally anti-business, with the exception of those who generously support his campaign fund.  Even then many of those companies have found him unbelievably treacherous.  The only hope for our economy and for Americans who want to be able to earn a living is the replacement of Obama with Romney.

Back-Radiation and the Highly Fallacious Kiehl-Trenberth Energy Budget

The usual greenhouse gas calculation such as is offered up by the various Trenberth diagrams is highly dominated by the radiative transport of energy in the Earth’s atmosphere.  It leads to an unreasonable result for the situation I am going to describe here.

But first, my approach to the back-radiation problem was always to show that it was unrealistic on many levels.  One cannot make a net gain of heat energy in a surface by returning a portion of the energy lost from a surface to it.  This is especially true of any process that is said to lose half of the surface emitted energy to space immediately and to only re-absorb some part of half of the energy that was returned to the surface.  I went further and explained that only a small fraction of the energy emitted as radiation from the surface was re-emitted as radiation from an absorbing water or CO2 molecule.  With just these considerations alone, the upper limit on once radiated energy from the surface which is re-absorbed by the surface would be:

(0.5) f,

where the 0.5 is the half of any IR absorbing molecule radiation which was not radiated into space and is radiated toward the surface.  The fraction f is the fraction of the IR energy lost by the surface and absorbed by an IR absorbing molecule which is re-emitted before collisions have dissipated the energy absorbed.  The fraction f is much less than one because most often the IR absorbing molecule undergoes collisions with other molecules and transfers much of the IR absorbed energy to other molecules before re-emission occurs.  These other molecules are rarely water or CO2 or other IR emitting molecules, so that energy is not returned to the surface as IR radiation.  Thus much of the surface emitted IR radiation is dissipated to the 99.97% of the atmosphere molecules which are nitrogen, oxygen, or argon and are not IR emitters.

Let us estimate the value of f.  At sea level, the mean gas velocity is 459 m/s, the mean free path or distance between collisions is only 6.6 x 10^-8 m or 66 nm, and the collision frequency is 6.9 billion/s.  At an altitude of about 4000 m, the radiative transfer of energy competes about evenly with transfer by collisions.  At 4000 m altitude, the frequency of gas molecule collisions is about 4.4 billion/s.  We can use the equivalency of energy transfer by radiation and gas molecule collisions at the 4000 meter altitude to estimate the fraction of energy transfer by radiation of the total of energy transferred by radiation plus gas molecule collisions. At sea level, energy transfer by radiation is equivalent to about 4.4 x 109 collisions per second, so the fraction of energy transferred by radiation is about 4.4/(4.4 + 6.9) = 0.39 of the total by gas molecule collisions and radiation.  This suggests that about 1.5 times as much energy is transferred by gas collisions as by radiation at sea level.

So at this point, the upper limit on IR radiation emitted from the surface which can be returned to the surface and absorbed by it is about:

(0.5) (0.39) = 0.195

It also has to be remembered that this is the upper limit for that portion of the IR radiation from the surface which can be absorbed by an IR-absorbing molecule such as water or CO2.  Much of the surface-emitted IR radiation is of such wavelengths that no IR-absorbing molecule can absorb it in the first place.  If one takes this fact into account, the 0.195 upper limit is a hugely generous upper limit.

But, it does not follow that simply because this much back-radiated IR is incident upon the surface that it will be absorbed by the surface.  During the roughly 8 hours of a day when the surface is warming under increasing sunlight and with a 2-hour lag for warming the ground, water, or air in a vicinity, none of this radiation may be absorbed, except when a cloud casts a shadow on a part of the area or at such points under the shadow of a tree of some such object.  The absorbing ground has to be cooler than the ground from which the photon was emitted and subsequently absorbed by an IR-absorbing molecule in the atmosphere.  During the remaining cooling hours of the day, roughly 16 hours, the surface is more likely to absorb such back-radiated energy.  As a mean value for re-absorption of IR back-radiation over the daily cycle, the value of 0.95 is often used.  I believe that value is much too high.

Let us look at one of the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budgets for a moment:

According to this diagram, 67/ 342 = 0.196 of the incoming solar radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere.  77/342 = 0.225 is reflected by clouds and aerosols.  The surface reflects 30/(30 + 168) = 0.152 of the solar radiation incident upon the surface.  Thermals cooling the surface dissipate 24/168 = 0.143 of this incident radiation.  Let us note that the surface emits a flux of 390 W/m^2 of IR radiation and according to this diagram the atmosphere has absorbed a highly efficient 324 W/m^2 of this or 83.1% of this.  Yet, above I showed in very simple terms that 19.5% is more than the upper limit by far of the amount of IR radiation that the atmosphere can return, which is not from IR-absorbing gas molecules that are substantially cooler than the Earth's surface.

Now let us consider a midday calculation of the surface and do so where there is no cloud cover and where it is so dry that there is no evapotranspiration.  What kind of surface temperature will we have.  Since there are no clouds and I think clouds are the better part of the summed cloud and aerosol effect, let us assume the aerosol effect alone is 0.08.  The midday radiation incident on the upper atmosphere is 1367 W/m^2.  Note that at midday, the incident radiation path length through the atmosphere is shorter than it is for the average daily values normally used, so losses in the atmosphere should be lower than these numbers.  I will use them nonetheless.

The radiation upon the ground is then:

(1 - 0.196) (1- 0.08) (1 - 0.152) (1 - 0.143) 1367 W/m^2 = 734.8 W/m^2

The ground temperature is then found from:

734.8 W/m^2 = ε σ T^4,  ε = 0.95

T = 341.8 K = 68.6̊C = 155.5̊F

But if you believe that the upper limit amount of back-radiation is 95% absorbed by the surface, then the incident radiation is:

(734.8 W/m^2) (1 + 0.195(0.95)) = 870.9 W/m^2

T = 356.6 K = 83.4̊C = 182.2̊F

Now this is clearly much too hot and implies that even the addition of this upper limit of back-radiation which is much smaller than the back-radiation in the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram and energy budget is not physical.  In reality, air convection or thermal effects are more important in cooling the surface than the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budget allows for.  The same is true of water evaporation, transport, and condensation effects.

Note that I did not follow the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram in subtracting the emitted radiation that corresponds to the Earth’s surface temperature.  They subtract 390 W/m^2 and add back in 324 W/m^2 of back-radiation for their mean daily calculation.  This would imply that if we had no atmosphere with IR absorbing gases in it, then there would be no back-radiation, so the total energy budget would look like:

(168 - 24 - 78 - 390) W/m^2 = -324 W/m^2,

which is nonsense.  Of course you might say that the thermals would be different and if I have no absorbing IR gases, then I certainly do not have water evaporation and movement.  This perhaps is a muddled situation.

So let us consider the equivalent calculation technique for an isolated black body radiator in space with incident energy flux of Ii and an emitted radiation of Ie.  But Ii = Ie, so then this approach would have us fallaciously conclude that

Ii - Ie = 0 = σ T^4 and T = 0 K.

The temperature of the isolated black (or gray) body is determined by the incident radiation on it.  The basic approach of the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram to radiation is nonsense.  The energy budget is a farce based on bad physics.  Indeed, when challenged on this issue, many proponents of man-made catastrophic global warming back down and say that the General Circulation Models are calculated primarily as air and water vapor circulation models and are not really consistent with the several variations of the Kiehl-Trenberth Energy Budget.  Yet it is such fallacious energy budgets that the public has been fed as the basis for the claim that there are substantial effects on the Earth's surface temperature due to man's emissions of CO2.  Government websites have been full of these energy budgets, as have college classes.  For their part, the range of results in the GCM computer models is too large to be consistent with the idea that climate science is settled and everyone agrees that it is understood.

ObamaCare: No Due Process, Unconstitutional Tax

It is said that the 5-4 Supreme Court decision that ObamaCare is constitutional in NFIB v. Sebelius provided that the penalty for not buying the expensive health insurance plan mandated by the government is redesignated a tax, is not entirely bad because by a 7-2 decision the court decided that ObamaCare was unconstitutional under a basis provided by either the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause.  It is now well-established that there are some limits to the powers granted the government by these other clauses of the Constitution, which had been the primary basis for the Obama administration claim that ObamaCare was constitutional.  The law was held to be constitutional as re-written by Chief Justice Roberts.

Nonetheless, the Supreme Court declared a highly unconstitutional law to be constitutional, as it has long had a tendency to do.  It has violated the fundamental American Principle that forms the foundation for the purpose and function of the government which the Constitution mandated as the will of the People.  The Constitution written and signed by the members of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and which went into effect after 9 states had approved it in 1789, was a reformation of the government of the United States of America.

The United States of American began with the Declaration of Independence, signed 2 July 1776 and announced publicly on 4 July 1776.  The Declaration of Independence had proclaimed that every individual has an equal and inalienable (or sovereign) right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It was understood that these individual rights were not granted by government and that they resided in each individual man by virtue of his nature.  Individual human rights included the right to property.  The most important property each man held was his own body and mind and his labor.  The Declaration of Independence decreed that any government that violated an individual's rights was illegitimate.  Government should have as its purpose and sole function the protection of individual rights.

This American Principle of highly limited government devoted to the protection of the rights of the individual, was the basis for the government mandated by the People in the Constitution for the same United States of America which took effect in 1789.  The continuation of our government in a new form did not result in an abrogation of the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, which ended the American Revolutionary War and created a number of agreements which the Great Britain had still not fulfilled in 1789.  President Washington continued to try to hold the British to those requirements of the Treaty of Paris.  We were not a new country in 1789 and we still owed our existence and our birth as a nation to the Declaration of Independence.  While the powers given to the government by the Constitution were thought by many to be so restricted and limited that the government could not pose any threat to individual rights, most Americans worried so much about some future infringements that they demanded the Bill of Rights as a condition of their approving the Constitution.  The People then thought the Constitution with its Bill of Rights was a clear mandate for a government that could not violate our sovereign individual rights.

It was well-understood that government, while needed to protect individual rights, was also very inclined to add to its powers until government became the primary violator of individual rights.  Such is the case in the United States of America today.  The federal courts have neglected the context in making decisions of law generally and constitutional law in particular that is provided by the foundational  American Principle.  Without the repeated and constant guidance of that principle, long strings of court cases were decided and precedent was established which provided government with more and more of the additional powers it desired, but which caused government to become the primary violator of individual rights in the USA today.  Such unguided and out-of-context decisions greatly expanded the powers of government by expanding the scope of the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and the power to tax without regard to the effect upon our individual rights.  As a result, Congress was under the impression when it passed ObamaCare that these clauses of the Constitution gave it the power to do almost anything it chose to do.

Precedent is important and helps people to understand the law and its interpretations and to prevent sudden interpretation changes.  This is true only if those precedents were established in a manner consistent with the American Principle, however.  In our case decisions too often have not been consistent.  Any interpretation of the Constitution or of any law deemed to be constitutional, must be consistent with the requirement that legitimate government cannot violate individual rights.  It is the American Principle that makes the United States of America exceptional among nations and which legitimately causes a freedom-loving People to admire what they once had here in the United States of America.


ObamaCare: Due Process Failure

From early in the legislative process to create ObamaCare, the American People have been deprived of due process in this law which will have very drastic effects upon our lives and the exercise of their rights.  I have discussed many of these in the past and the present 5-4 Supreme Court decision has added to the list of due process failures.  The following is a list of many of these due process failures:

• The name of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a misrepresentation of the act.  It was always clear it would make health care more expensive for almost everyone and that the quality of healthcare would suffer for most people.  The act was a fraud perpetrated upon the People, so they were less likely to bring appropriate pressure upon their elected representatives to oppose its passage and protect their individual rights.
• The principal effect of ObamaCare was to turn ownership of every individual's body and the mental health of their minds to the collective in the most direct and obvious violation of individual rights.  The intent of the law was to force individuals to buy a more expensive and comprehensive insurance policy than most need as an individual so that free-riders could not game the government intrusion into the health care system that already controlled half of that marketplace.  It was also so that a very small fraction of people with pre-existing conditions could get health insurance.  But, neither the plight of a few people with pre-existing conditions nor some free-riders, could justify any constitutional judgment that ObamaCare was an act of legitimate government.  Clearly, most people were going to suffer a real and important loss of their ability to manage their own lives, decide how to protect their health, and were going to suffer a loss of happiness while forced to wait in pain for long periods to see overworked, underpaid, and angry doctors whose medical skills and equipment were going to suffer degradations relative to the free market alternative.
• Each of our elected representatives and the President have an obligation recognized in their oath of office to protect the Constitution.  They are clearly in violation of this oath every time they vote for or sign into law a bill which they have not read.  This is a major violation of due process and should be recognized as such.  The votes of any Senator or Representative who did not read the bill and properly judge whether it was constitutional or not are invalid votes.  This being the case, the bill did not pass either the House or the Senate legitimately and with due process.
• Many additional effects of the law were misrepresented. It was claimed over and over that if one liked one's present health care insurance plan, one could keep it.  The law clearly did not allow this.  It was said over and over that the panels that would decide what medical care would be provided to whom, were not Death Panels, and yet these same panels are declaring that many life-saving operations previously provided to those 70 and over will no longer be offered or provided.  The same will be true of newborn infants.  Life or death will be decided by these panels, but we cannot recognize that function!  Fraud once again was practiced to ease the passage of this law, which barely did so.  Perhaps some Senators and Representatives were fooled by these fallacious claims and would not have voted for the bill had they known.
• Tax bills must originate from the House of Representatives.  This bill is full of new taxes, even prior to the Supreme Court ruling that the penalty is really a tax.  This bill did not originate in the House.  H.R. 3590 was a bill called Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009 which was passed by the House, whose name and content was completely changed by Senator Harry Reid and turned into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  This was a transparent violation of the Origination Clause requiring revenue bills to come from the House.  Chief Justice Roberts chose to take no notice of this constitutional violation, though the dissenting opinion did note it.
• ObamaCare is essentially a huge outline of a bill which ceded the responsibility of the Congress to write bills in large part to agencies under the Executive Branch who are writing or have written thousands of pages of rules and regulations to implement ObamaCare which Congress has not reviewed in fulfillment of its constitutional duty.  These Executive Branch agencies and cabinet departments are not constitutional allowed to establish laws.
• Tax laws cannot be reviewed by the Federal Courts until the taxes in them take effect.  This case was reviewed by the Supreme Court and allowed to stand even as that court claimed that the huge penalties of the bill were taxes.  Those taxes are not yet being assessed, so this bill should not have been reviewed under due process at this time.  The fact that the decision was rendered is in direct contradiction of the decision that the penalty is a tax.
• The bill claims the penalties for not buying the government mandated health payment plans are not taxes.  The American people were told by many Senators, Congressmen, and the President that they were not taxes.  Indeed, the purpose of a tax is to raise revenue, while that of a penalty is to compel behavior.  This compelling of behavior was the aim of the ObamaCare bill.  Justice Roberts says the tax is not high enough to force anyone to buy ObamaCare health insurance, so it does not compel behavior, so it is not a penalty.  This is a tortured viewpoint.  Since the majority of the Supreme Court now says they are taxes, even if this bill had been passed by Congress and signed into law under due process, that due process would have been forfeit now.  The Supreme Court is not authorized by the Constitution to create new legislation on its own as it just did.  Laws are made in Congress, which has the first pass on deciding whether a law is constitutional or not.  Then the President has an opportunity to veto a bill if he thinks it is unconstitutional.

ObamaCare is Now an Unconstitutional Tax

Chief Justice Roberts and the four radical leftists on the Supreme Court redesignated the penalty for not buying a particular prescribed government health "insurance" policy at an elevated cost largely dictated by conditions of inclusion set by the government to be a tax.  This tax is a direct tax and has not been apportioned among the states as required by Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution:

No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

This means that any direct tax can only be levied upon a state in proportion to its population.  Presumably an income tax would be based on all income in the U.S. and each state would be required to provide a tax in proportion to its state population.  If the federal government decided that tax on income was to be 20%, then the tax to be collect would be (0.2) I, where I is the total national income.  If a particular state has a population which is equal to 2% of the national population, then it has to provide income tax revenue in its state of (0.02)(0.2) I to the federal government.  This makes it constitutionally impossible for the federal government to levy a progressive direct income tax and it means the tax in a given state will not be in the same proportion as income in that state.

The 16th Amendment seems to most Americans today to have created an exception to this injunction against direct taxes for the specific case of income taxes.  This was not so, because at the time this amendment was passed, income was considered to be, and was affirmed as such by the Supreme Court in Eisner v. Macomber in 1918 and in Merchants Loan and Trust v. Smietanka in 1921 to be the profit a corporation made.  In earlier decisions, Pollock v. Farmer's Loan and Trust (1895) and Brushaber v. Union Pacific Rail Road (1916), the Supreme Court had ruled that to be an indirect tax, income had to be separated from its source.  If a corporation was paid rent money for a building it owned, it had to subtract its expenses for renting the building and this established separation from the source of the income.  The tax on the profit from the rental was an indirect tax.

The rulings of the Supreme Court make it clear that a so-called income tax levied upon an individual's salary, wages, tips, commissions, and bonuses are direct taxes and are prohibited by the Constitution.  These direct payments belong to the individual as a matter of right, because his labor is his property by right.  Despite such payments not having been considered to be income in 1913 when the Income Tax Amendment was approved, the Supreme Court has never since these early cases taken up the protection of the individual right to payment for one's labor.  The government now taxes these payments without separation and without subtracting expenses in clear violation of the individual right to one's own labor and its fruits.  One might say the Supreme Court did for the income tax what it has just done for ObamaCare.  It found a limited way for it to be started and then never re-examined those situations it said were unconstitutional.

In a completely specious argument, Chief Justice Roberts claimed the penalty was a tax since it was not levied on most people.  The fraction of the population upon which a tax is levied has nothing at all to do with its being direct or indirect. 

Justice Roberts said that a tax that forced Americans to buy the government prescribed health insurance would be unconstitutional.  He said a penalty high enough to do so would be unconstitutional.  But, he says since the present tax is too low to compel Americans to buy health insurance, it is constitutional.  If this law is not soon repealed, it will fail because too many Americans will pay the tax rather than buy the more expensive health payment plan.  Future Congresses will then raise the tax until individuals are compelled to buy the health payment plan and then by Roberts' decision the law will be unconstitutional.

But will the Supreme Court actually review such a law and declare it unconstitutional?  Based on the precedent of the income tax, no.  But the reasoning offered by Roberts and the majority is very specious and very flimsy.  It begs to be reversed.  It is no wonder the dissenting Justices are very unhappy about this decision.  This decision has brought great disdain upon the Supreme Court majority by those who value reason and expect it to be valued by the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court has once again failed to protect the sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

Supreme Court Betrays Individual Rights Completely

By upholding the constitutionality of the abomination known as ObamaCare, the United States Supreme Court has joined the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the current usurping presidential office holder in violating the Constitution and the very concept of sovereign individual rights.  Each of the four institutions and three branches of the federal government has failed its constitutional mandate to limit the powers of the federal government in accord with the enumerated powers given the government in a blatantly obvious overreach of power.  Obama and a Democrat House and Senate betrayed their duty to protect our equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of our own minds and bodies, and our personal pursuit of happiness by passing this tyrannical act.  The Supreme Court, in a declaration of its complete uselessness, backed this Democrat Socialist seizure of power.  It declared that every American mind and body belongs to the collective and is not owned by the individual.

In order to perpetuate this heinous act, it declared that the basis on which ObamaCare was passed by the legislature was a fraud, but the Supreme Court exists to quash individual rights in the name of fraud.  Despite repeated claims by the House, Senate, and Obama that the penalties for not purchasing a government prescribed healthcare plan were not a tax, the Supreme Court decided it was a tax.  What is more, it fallaciously claimed that the tax was necessary and proper to the function of legitimate government.

I will once again remind everyone that our Declaration of Independence defined legitimate government as one whose sole function was the protection of our equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  ObamaCare is an interference with my control of my life in a most basic and fundamental way.  It refuses to allow me to maintain my own life.  It is clearly a huge restriction of my liberties.  I can further assure you that this law prevents me from being happy and will very likely subject me to future personal pain due to my own future medical problems and due to any suffered by those I love.

The passage and upholding of ObamaCare is the end of a "long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces [here, evincing] a Design to reduce them [the People] under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security."

Despite the unified federal government claim that my mind and body do not belong to me, I declare that they do belong to me and only to me.  My individual rights are mine whether this tyrannical government chooses to recognize that fact or not.  Until such time as the federal government resumes its responsibility to protect rather than to violate individual rights, it no longer has any claim upon my goodwill.  My sole allegiance is to my individual rights and to those who demand their own individual rights.  Those who would steal my mind and body, who would force me to buy health insurance, who would further force me to buy the insurance of their choice rather mine, who claim the life and death power to have DEATH PANELS decide how long I may have to suffer without medical treatment and whether or not I can receive life-extending medical care or not, are my sworn enemies.  These people are thieves and would-be slave masters who have earned nothing but my disdain.

I am in a state of Rebellion in fulfillment of my Duty and my Right as recognized in the Declaration of Independence.  I will seek to carry this rebellion out by ousting the Democrat Socialists from control of the Senate and the presidency and by further reducing their numbers in the House of Representatives in the November 2012 election.  I will, if there is success in this, then do all in my power to see to it that future Justices chosen to the Supreme Court are not tyrants and sycophants to tyrants.

If the November elections do not remove these Intolerable Tyrants from public office, then more drastic means of rebellion will be necessary.  Under no circumstance will I buy any health insurance plan mandated by ObamaCare.  I fully expect that draconian despotic act to try to send me to prison for five years.  Let them try.

Was the Warming of the Late 20th Century Unprecedented?

Those who claim that the effects of man's emissions of carbon dioxide on climate are catastrophic, have commonly said the high temperatures of the late 20th Century and the rate of their rise was unprecedented.  All of the extensive evidence of warm periods in Europe and around its periphery is often said to be only due to local effects, without a worldwide analog.  Over the last 10 years more evidence that these warm events existed in places such as China and South America has been found, but the non-European evidence is not so voluminous that those who make the claim of unprecedented warming recently have been quieted.  A new study of sea surface temperatures in the East China Sea over the last 2700 years adds to that evidence that the recent history has precedents.


Weichao Wu of Peking University and 4 other colleagues of various universities in China collected a sediment core from the sea floor in the Southern Okinawa Trough over which the warm Kuroshio current flows.  "The researchers analyzed the top 10 meters of the sediment core, corresponding to 2,700 years of sedimentation and from it were able to resolve 25-yr averages. To determine the SST, they used the “relative number of cyclopentane isoprenoid GDGTs in marine crenarchaeota (Thaumarchaeota)” which “increases with increasing growth temperature.”""  "...they identified a tracer in the sediment layers that is a measure of the relative abundance of a tiny marine organism whose number is sensitive to the sea surface temperature. The more crenarchaeota that are evident in the sediment layer, the higher the ocean temperature."

The temperature history from this proxy reconstruction is shown in the graph below with data points for each 25-year average and a running three-point mean line. 



Their sea surface temperature reconstruction clearly shows the Roman Warm period (RWP), the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP),  the Sui-Tang dynasty Warm Period (STWP),  the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), the Little Ice Age (LIA), and the Current Warm Period (CWP). The warm period from 500 to 350 BC was when Persian and Greek civilizations arose.  The highest temperature data point for this period is higher than any for the recent CWP.  The rate of rise at its start is also faster.  The highest temperature in the RWP is also higher, as is the rate of initial rise in temperature for the RWP, compared to the CWP.  The STWP seems to have displaced a longer Dark Ages Cool Period in Europe.  The highest temperature in the MWP in the East China Sea is higher than the recent warming also, though the MWP in Europe was more substantial than that in the East China Sea.

The important thing is that higher temperatures and higher rates of temperature increase, as well as higher rates of temperature decrease, have occurred in the past in other areas of the world with a significant correlation to the events of Europe and its surroundings.  The temperature proxy data used to construct the hockey stick temperature record of the last IPCC assessment report was very limited.  As pointed out by Ian Plimer in Heaven and Earth global warming the missing science, there actually is much information from around the world that indicates how misleading that hockey stick temperature plot really was.

The Federal Government Extortion of Businesses

I have often written that when government takes on the powers of illegitimate government, it becomes a threat to businesses and other special interests operating in the private sector.  Business is especially vulnerable, because that is where the money is and many people have a bias against commercial interests.  Government politicians have a hankering for their money and want to pretend to be protecting the People from some powerful threat to them.  So, politicians shake down companies by threatening them with harmful legislation and simply by using their access to and influence over the press to give businesses a bad name.

Companies, like it or not, are forced to become lobbyists.  Once they get into that, they are generally tempted, as are other special interest groups such as labor unions, public employees, trial lawyers, accountants, environmentalists, and religious groups, to take over the controls of government.  This is fairly easy to do since the government has by then become far too complex for most of the People to understand and control.  Indeed, some companies and other interest groups see how easy it is to take over the controls of government and leap to those controls without even being extorted.  It can be an easy route to power and influence and to riches.  Control of government can also be used through regulations and licensing requirements to reduce competition.  The great Institute for Justice is renowned for trying to eliminate licensing and similar restrictions that keep people from earning a living.  The Competitive Enterprise Institute tries to reduce the number of regulations designed to reduce competition.

Timothy Carney has a very interesting tale of how Orrin Hatch, Utah Republican Senator, forced Microsoft to get into the lobbying business very much against its will.  It is well worth reading.

2012 Electoral Map Prediction Update

Back on 11 March 2012, I predicted that Romney would win 315 Electoral College votes in the November 2012 election, which was enough for him to post a substantial win.  The continuing high real unemployment rate of 13.0%, rather than the misleading government 8.2% rate that no one believes anymore, will pretty much insure this outcome.  Obama is madly trying to paste together a number of minority constituencies, but these groups are mostly suffering much higher rates of unemployment than the white population.  While he will get a large majority of the black and a majority of the Hispanic and youth votes, these majorities will be smaller than in 2008 and the turn-out of these groups will be way down, especially that of young voters.  Many white voters, having proved they are not racists by voting for a black man, are now inclined to judge Obama on his accomplishments, and many are sorely disappointed.  Ideologically, he has made it very clear that this election is about his ideal of ever bigger government and more collectivism versus an ideal that favors a robust private sector and free enterprise, where more freedom of individual choice reigns.  The Tea Party and elections since 2008 have made it quite clear who is going to win that stark ideological choice.

The New York Times is presently predicting that there are 217 safe votes for Obama and 206 safe votes for Romney.  They breakdown the leaning and toss-up votes as follows:

Leaning to Obama:

Maine, 4

Michigan, 16

New Mexico, 5

Minnesota, 10

Leaning to Romney:

Arizona, 11

Indiana, 11

Missouri, 10

North Carolina, 15

Nebraska's Omaha Congressional District, 1

Toss-Ups:

Colorado, 9
Florida, 29
Iowa, 6
New Hampshire, 4
Nevada, 6
Ohio, 18
Pennsylvania, 20
Virginia, 13
Wisconsin, 10

The economy appears to have little chance of improving before the election.  It may actually worsen as Europe has slipped into a second recession and the growth in the rest of the world has slowed.  The highly negative impacts of recent EPA, FDA, FDIC, and NRLB rulings on businesses are also piling on.  The national debt continues to soar.  Major banks have just had their credit ratings reduced.  A huge tax increase looms in early 2013.  I see no reason for the states leaning to Romney to reverse course to Obama.  Obama has too clearly shown that he has no program to effectively help the economy and produce jobs.  On the contrary, many are coming to understand that Obama is anti-business and interfering with American's right to earn a living.  Americans thinking about this between now and the election will shift more and more to Romney.  Adding these Romney-leaning states to Romney's total gives him 254 of the electoral votes out of the 270 votes he needs to win.  Romney only needs 16 of the 115 toss-up votes to win.  How it is that Obama is still the bettor's favorite to win the election is a mystery to me!

Now, let us examine each of these toss-up states to predict which way they will vote in the election.

Colorado, with 9 votes, has a history of being a toss-up state.  In the last four presidential elections it had a Democrat - Republican vote of 54 - 45%, 47 - 52%, 42 - 51%, and 44 - 46%.  It has leaned slightly Republican in these presidential races, but it has a Democrat Governor and 2 Democrat Senators.  It is represented in the House of Representatives by 4 Republicans and 3 Democrats.  The state senate is controlled by Democrats and the state house is controlled by Republicans.  State houses tend to indicate the direction of the party affiliation or philosophy is taking in a state.  For example, whether the people want more government (Democrat) or they want little change or even reductions (Republican).  State senate members and representatives to the U.S. Congress tend to be held onto due to their accumulated power, connections, and name recognition well after their philosophy has come to be out of touch with the people.  Environmentalism has long been a major theme of many of Colorado's people, but many people now know its claims that anything man does results in catastrophe are much exaggerated.  The May government unemployment rate was 8.1%, so unemployment is probably about equal to the national average.  Unless that rate falls, Obama is likely doomed here.  Colorado is also the 11th largest coal-producing state in the union and it has federal lands with a potential for a lot of oil and gas production, so Obama is clearly retarding the economic outlook for this state.  67% of the electricity generated in Colorado was from coal-fired power plants using mostly Colorado coal.  As a result of this and the production of oil in the Bakken Shale Oil Formation, only 10% of the after tax income of Colorado residents is spent on energy.  Considerable coal was exported to other states.  Coal production has been dropping despite extensive reserves.  Only 4.0% of the population is black, but 20.7% is Hispanic and Obama has to hope he retains as many of their votes as he received in 2008.  This is unlikely, despite his recent attempt to direct that young illegal aliens brought to the U.S. by their parents when they were young not be deported.  Colorado is more likely to vote for Romney than Obama.

Florida, 29 votes, has voted in the last four presidential elections with Democrat - Republican splits of 51 - 48, 47 - 52, 49 - 49, and 48 - 42%.  The Governor is a Republican, there is one Democrat and one Republican U.S. Senator, and there are 19 Republicans and 6 Democrats in their U.S. House of Representatives delegation.  They will add two Representatives in this 2012 election.  Both the Senate and the House of the state legislature are controlled by the Republicans.  This is basically a Republican state now, despite its past presidential election voting history.  In the past, the Democrats often used scare tactics about Medicare and Social Security to convince older voters to vote for them in national elections.  Now many of Florida's older population have seen cutbacks in the coverage of Medicare already under Obama and are having trouble finding physicians who will take them on as patients.  Many of them are paying much higher costs for their prescription drugs.  Many can only attribute this to the changes that have come with ObamaCare.  Romney was leading Obama as early as the 11 April to 16 May Gallup daily poll released on 18 May by 53% to 39% among those 70 and over.  The increasing effects of ObamaCare are not helping him with older voters as more and more of them feel those effects and attribute them to him and his party.  This is boding ill for Obama in the elderly state of Florida.  The state BLS unemployment rate in May was a very high 8.6%.  The population is 16.0% black and 22.5% Hispanic, but many of the Hispanics are long-time immigrants from Cuba or their children who were born here in the U.S.  This group of Hispanic voters has a voting record which is much more Republican than that for Hispanics outside of Florida.  Florida can ill afford to have its energy costs go up, since 12% of the average after tax income goes to energy costs and this rises to 22% for those with incomes below $50,000 a year.  Florida is unlikely to vote again for Obama and it is actually the only state Romney needs of these toss-up states.

Iowa, 6 votes, voted 54% Democrat to 44% Republican in the last election.  In the two Bush elections it voted 49 - 50% and 49% - 48%, and in Clinton's re-election it voted 50 - 40% in Clinton's favor.  The Governor is a Republican, the state Senate is Democrat, and the state House is Republican.  The two U.S. Senators have been around forever and one is a Republican and one a Democrat.  In the U.S. House of Representatives, it has 3 Democrats and 2 Republicans.  This state is truly split down the middle, but there is evidence of a slight re-direction toward Republicans.  The state is ranked 16th in coal-fired electric generation with 67% of its electricity produced by coal.  It has extensive coal deposits, but little coal mining.  12% of average after-tax income goes to energy costs, but this rises to 20% for those with incomes below $50,000 a year.  Its population is an aging one, with 14.9% of it 2010 population 65 or older, compared to the national average of 13.0%.  Its population growth has lagged the national average considerably, so it is in need of new industries and business growth, an unsurprising result of ranking 45th in business tax climate according to the Tax Foundation in 2011.  BLS unemployment is much lower than the national average at 5.1%.  Only 50.3% are women, compared to a national average of 50.8% women.  This is significant, since women are more likely than men to vote Democrat.  It is 91.3% white, 2.9% black, and 5.0% Hispanic.  The Midwest region has been trending Republican and Iowa is somewhat more likely to vote for Romney in the Fall.

New Hampshire, 4 votes, has voted 54-45, 50-49, 47-48, and 49-39% Democrat - Republican in the last four presidential elections.  The governor is a Democrat, but he is very busy vetoing bills passed by the Republican House and Senate of the New Hampshire legislature, called the General Court.  Both houses of the General Court switched from Democrat to Republican control in the 2010 election.  New Hampshire is represented by one Republican (elected in 2010) and one Democrat in the U.S. Senate, but by 2 Republicans in the U.S. House.  The state seems to want to trend Republican, despite considerable in-migration of people from Democrat Massachusetts over the years to the more business-friendly climate in New Hampshire.  The BLS state unemployment rate is only 5.0%.  The state has somewhat more people 65 and older than the national average with 13.5% compared to 13.0% nationally.  The state has the 5th highest electricity costs in the nation!  Coal provides only 11% of its electric power, while renewable energy sources provide 14%.  New Hampshire is ranked 7th in the nation in business tax friendliness by the Tax Foundation.  I believe as the election campaign continues, the people of New Hampshire will decide that Romney is a better match for them than is the failed Obama, whose anti-business rhetoric will not play well on them.

Nevada, 6 votes, has voted 55-43, 48-51, 46-50, and 44-43% in the last four presidential elections.  It has a Republican Governor, but both the state Senate and the Assembly are controlled by the Democrats.  Both of its U.S. Senators are Democrats and 2 of its 3 Congressmen are Democrats.  Nevada is a Democrat state with strong union organization of the principal industry, tourism.  The state has a business tax climate that makes it #4 in the nation according to the Tax Foundation in 2011.  One would think it would not be very susceptible to Obama's anti-business rhetoric, especially since its main industry is highly dependent upon the nation's economy.  The state land is 84.5% owned by the federal government.  This is the highest percentage federal ownership of any state and it keeps the people of the state from developing many of its resources and has caused land prices around Las Vegas to become very expensive.  This played a role in the extra severe real estate bust in the Las Vegas area.  Obama's refusal to allow commercial uses of federal land has hurt the state economy.  The BLS state unemployment rate is the highest in the nation at 11.6%, so Obama's policies have failed them worse than anyone else.  The state has few people 65 and older than the national average with only 12.0%.  The female population percentage is also lower at 49.5% compared to 50.8%.  Coal provides only 17% of its electricity, while renewables provide 16%, so it is the 25th least expensive electricity cost state.  Nevada should be pressuring the federal government to sell some of its land to reduce the national debt and to open up avenues for employment in other industries than tourism in Nevada, but the population of gamblers and entertainers in Las Vegas so overwhelms the rest of the state population now that they are perhaps just not the kind of people who will be interested in other opportunities.  I suspect this state is just not up to seeing its opportunities and as such, I consider it likely to be a toss-up come November, but very slightly leaning to the party whose policies has delivered them into BLS 11.6% unemployment.

Ohio, 18 votes:  Voted 52-47, 49-51, 47-50, and 47-41% Democrat to Republican in the last four presidential elections.  Ohio has taken a recent turn toward Republicans.  The Governor and both houses of the state legislature are Republican.  Ohio has one each U.S. Senator, but 13 Republican Representatives to 5 Democrats.  BLS unemployment is below the national average now at 7.3%.  Many of the manufacturing companies of Ohio had recent good income based on exports fueled by the strong growth of China, India, Brazil, and much of the rest of the world.  Strong growth in natural gas production in the eastern part of the state has helped the state economy considerably, no thanks to Obama.  Ohio is #10 in coal production and 78% of its electricity is generated by coal-fired power plants that Obama and his wild-eyed EPA want out of business.  Ohio has only 1% of electricity production by renewables, so the Democrats pressure the state to force an increase in that expensive and unreliable form of power generation.  Its electricity costs are already the 24th highest in the nation.  For those earning less than $50,000 a year, energy costs are taking about 22% of their after-tax income.  From 2000 to 2010, the population grew by only 1.6% compared to the national average of 9.7%.  The population is aging faster than that of the nation as a whole, 14.1% are 65 or older.  The female portion of the population is 51.2%, a bit higher than the average 50.8%.  I believe enough Ohioans (#46 rank for business taxes by the Tax Foundation) have come to see the need to develop a better business climate that it will not be deceived by Obama for another four years.  The recent trend has been strongly toward the Republicans and this state alone is sufficient for Romney to win.

Pennsylvania, 20 votes:  The last four presidential elections went 55-44, 51-49, 51-46, and 49-40 Democrat-Republican.  The state has recently swung strongly Republican.  The Governor is Republican, as are the state Senate and House.  Pennsylvania is represented by one Republican (strong Tea Party man elected in 2010) and one Democrat in the U.S. Senate.  Its Representatives in the U.S. House are 12 Republicans and 7 Democrats.  The BLS unemployment is 7.4%.  Pennsylvania is #4 in coal production and 44% of its electricity is generated by coal-fired electric power plants.  The development of the Marcellus Shale Oil Formation has brought a lot of money into the state.  Households with incomes less than $50,000 a year are spending 19% of their after-tax income on energy.  This will be going up due to the EPA shutting down some refineries in the Philadelphia area.  Pennsylvania was ranked 26th by the Tax Foundation for business taxes, which is much better than any of the states on its borders, except Delaware at #8.  The population is a very old one with 15.4% 65 or older.  It is also a bit heavy on females at 51.3%.  The population is 81.9% white, 10.8% black, and 5.7% Hispanic.  It is to be expected that many of the dead will rise up and vote for Obama in Philadelphia, but this state has recently swung strongly Republican, perhaps finally becoming largely aware of the they cling to their guns and religion attitude of the Democrat Party.  I believe Romney will win in Pennsylvania and it is enough by itself to give him the Presidency.

Virginia, 13 votes:  The last four presidential votes were 53-46, 46-54, 44-53, and 45-47 Democrat-Republican.  The Governor, state Senate, and state House of Delegates are all Republican.  The two U.S. Senators are Democrats, but the Congressmen are 8 Republicans and 3 Democrats.  The state has moved strongly Republican recently.  The BLS unemployment is only 6.9% and the Governor has told Governor Perry of Texas repeatedly that he intends to have the state ranked higher than Texas for its business climate.  In some rankings he has achieved that.  The Tax Foundation ranks Virginia #12 and Texas #13 on business tax favorability.  The military vote is very important in Virginia and Obama has become very unpopular with the military.  The state is #12 in coal production and large amounts of coal are shipped by railroad to its port at Newport News for export.  Only 30% of its electricity is generated by coal and only 3% by renewables.  Its energy costs are the 23rd lowest.  Virginia's population grew by 13.0% from 2000 to 2010 compared to the national growth of 9.7%.  Only 12.2% is 65 or over and 50.9% is female.  The state is 68.6% white, 19.4% black, and 7.9% Hispanic.  Many federal employees live in Northern Virginia.  These demographics would seem very favorable to Obama, but these same demographics produced an very predominantly Republican state government and representation in the House of Representatives.  Blacks will turn out to vote in smaller numbers and federal employees will not see Romney as a threat.  Indeed, they will see him as a relief from many Mickey Mouse policies and Czars that are bugging many of them.  Virginia will vote for Romney in November and it and any other toss-up state is enough to make Romney President.

Wisconsin, 10 votes: The last presidential elections went 56-42, 49-45, 48-48, and 49-39% Democrat to Republican.  Yet, Wisconsin has been part of the sweeping change over the Midwest toward the Republican Party.  The Governor is Republican and the Senate was Republican after the 2010 elections, but the recall of several Republicans succeeded in replacing one of them.  The Senate is now split 16-16.  The Assembly is 59 Republicans to 39 Democrats.  From 2000 to 2010, the population grew by 6.0%.  It is 86.2% white, 6.3% black, and 5.9% Hispanic.  13.7% is 65 or over and 50.4% is female.  The demographics are pretty favorable to Romney.  Coal-powered generating plants produce 63% of the state electricity, with 8% renewable power.  It has the 17th highest cost by state ranking.  Unemployment is 6.8%.  Wisconsin will vote for Romney in November and it and any other toss-up state except New Hampshire is enough for him to become President.

Of these swing states, Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin are presently basically Republican states, with a total of 94 electoral votes.  I believe they will all vote for Romney rather than to continue the failed Obama presidency.  Colorado and Iowa will likely do the same.  So, my prediction on how the 2012 presidential election will turn out is this:

As it turns out, it still looks to me that Romney will get 315 electoral votes and he may even pick up Michigan and Nevada, though I suspect they may be a bit more likely to wind up in the Obama losers column.  Michigan may soon join Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Missouri in the new midwest state alignment with the Republican Party, but perhaps not in time for this election.

Self-Employment Accounts for All Added Jobs

Yes, all of those new jobs that Obama says he created are due to a large increase in the numbers of the self-employed.  Many of these newly self-employed have become self-employed because they could not find jobs otherwise in the never-ending Great Socialist Recession.  The self-employed have kept Obama from looking like the total job-destroyer he is.  I seriously doubt that many of these newly self-employed believe Obama created their job, though many may think he necessitated their job.

Let us look at the numbers in the working age population, the labor force, and those employed who are covered by unemployment benefits from an important and fascinating article by Mike Shedlock called 100% of U.S. Jobs Added Since 2010 Have Been Self-Employment, Contractor, or Other Jobs Without Unemployment Insurance Benefits.  Note that the self-employed pay unemployment taxes, but are not eligible to collect benefits if their business fails or if they are unable to pay themselves a paycheck.  As Shedlock reported in another article, 23% of the self-employed have gone a full year during this recession without a paycheck.  This is 6.21 million working Americans who have worked a year without pay.  69% of small business owners have loaned their companies their own money to keep their companies going through the recession.

The gap between the labor force, which is those employed plus those known to be seeking employment, and the population has been increasing since the depths of the recession.  The number of employed people who are eligible to draw unemployment benefits if they lose their job is still below the number who were employed and covered at the end of 2008 by 3.2 million people!  Now we need to examine the number of self-employed and contractors who are not covered by unemployment insurance to find out where the jobs come from that Obama is claiming he has created.

The red line is the BLS total employment number by year, while the blue line is the number of employed people covered by unemployment insurance.  Both of these are plotted against the number on the left axis.  The difference between these numbers is the number of uncovered employees, or those without unemployment insurance coverage.  The uncovered employee numbers are on the right axis and plotted in green.  This number is mostly equal to those who are self-employed, though in some states some may be people who are periodically employed with long gaps in their employment.

Since 2009, self-reliant Americans have become self-employed in growing numbers each year.  But covered employees, those working for an employer, decreased from 2009 to 2010 and then again in 2011.  There was finally a small increase in covered employees so far in 2012, though the number is still slightly below the number in 2010!  The important thing to note is that whether we measure the increase in the total number employed from 2009 or from 2010, the entire net increase is due to an increase in the number of self-employed Americans!

Total employment dropped sharply in 2009 and hit its low point in 2010.  The number of self-employed had been slowly dropping since 2005, but dropped sharply in 2009.  Then it rose sharply in 2010 and again smartly in 2011.  It was the self-employed entirely who gave some temporary credence to the false jobs recoveries of 2010 and 2011.  The increase in 2012 has been more modest and was matched for the first time by an increase in the covered employed.

In 2009, the self-employed or uncovered employed were a low 9.1% of the employed.  Now, they are 13.1% of the employed.  Many of these employed are tenuously employed since even in normal times about half of all small business start-ups fail within 5 years.  According to a survey by Citigroup, 54% of small business owners say they have gone without a paycheck to stay in business.  38% say their employees worked overtime without pay.  18% of the small business owners say employees had delayed paychecks.  Life for small businesses can be very tough in decent times, but when the federal government is determined to be anti-business and even promises to put whole industries into bankruptcy while tossing money madly at businesses with no possible market, the life of small businesses can become truly nightmarish.  The withdrawal of wealth from the private sector, whether by taxes, by deficit spending, or by regulatory mandates, is particularly tough on small businesses.

This is the thanks Obama has given to the self-employed who have single-handedly provided him with his only possible rationale for being re-elected.  Obama keeps talking about some 4 million jobs he has created.  Apparently, these jobs are the jobs these 5.91 million newly self-employed Americans really created.  I suspect few of them will vote for Obama.

The Objectivist Oasis Blog by Maggie Van Aken

Maggie Van Aken is an Objectivist who has left a career as an educator to care for her two daughters and to write.  She recently started a blog called Objectivist Oasis.  She has been a regular reader of my blog and asked me to take a look at her blog.  I read several of her posts and found that she has many good ideas.  I plan to read more of her posts.

An example of a particularly interesting post was The Real Problem with American Public Education.

She makes a number of good points in this post.  One of her particularly good points pushed me into thinking about the trade of values that she discusses between teacher and student.  My own formulation of this important idea is given below, and it owes much to her insights:

Education properly requires a number of complex trades. Properly, parents would pay teachers to teach their children, who would also reward teachers by developing their knowledge and critical thinking skills. The government-run schools (note I do not call them public schools because that suggests that the schools serve the People, rather than the government) dilute the control and the investment of parents in the education of their children by transferring their funding role to the electorate and taxpayers at large. The teachers then have a much lessened relationship with the parents of the children they teach. The teacher's responsibility to the parents to teach their children is much reduced and the parents lose control of the education of their child. The child has a responsibility to his parents in a proper education system to make sure that their family money is well-spent, but in the government-run school this responsibility is replaced with a very vague one to the taxpayer, which will mean little to a child and not much more to even most adults.

If the teacher belongs to a union and the union leadership says that they do not care about the education of the child, then some teachers are likely to adopt the same attitude. But it is also true that some teachers will make a genuine effort to teach children and they should be rewarded by students who learn. The students in government-run schools will often learn that "free" education means that they are owed an education and that those who pay for it are not deserving of any gratitude. But, if the payers are not worthy of gratitude, why would the teacher be worthy of gratitude either? The payers do not get anything in return, so why should the able teacher get anything in return? As a result, the government-run schools destroy the entire hierarchy of value exchanges upon which education depends.

John Galt on Happiness

In the John Galt broadcast speech from Ayn Rand's great novel Atlas Shrugged, he says:

Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death.  Happiness is that state of consciousness that proceeds from the achievement of one's values.  A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness -- to value the failure of your values -- is an insolent negation of morality.  A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard.  By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man -- every man -- is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

It is only when we understand that happiness is our personal conscious awareness of the achievement of our own values, that we achieve an ability to manage our lives so that we might be happy.  One has to rationally identify and choose one's own values.  One has to act to achieve them.  The goal-directed thought and action we take to do this becomes a basis for our respect and appreciation for other living beings who do the same.  As we claim our own right to life in this manner, so do we generate a basis for recognizing the right of other rational beings to do the same.  Those we see striving to use their minds to choose values suitable for promoting their survival and providing them the possibility of happiness gain value to us.  We can identify with the effort they make to manage their own lives and we appreciate it.

While each human being is incredibly complex and highly differentiated, we also share a high regard for rationality, purposeful effort, and the self-esteem that comes from success in these endeavors.  We enjoy seeing others in a state of happiness.  In a society of such people, there are innumerable ways to co-operate so that we may each more readily achieve our goals.  By doing so, we make it easier for each of us to achieve a state of happiness.  We do this in a way that minimizes instances in which one of us blocks or interferes with another achieving his goals.  We do this in a way that bans the use of force as a means take the values of others from them.  This society is one in which people trade values for values, each value appraised somewhat differently by the traders in commercial markets, but perhaps valued equivalently in our rich, non-commercial lives.

In contrast, there is the society in which mankind claims that happiness is achieved by selfless acts.  In such a society, each man is separated from the means to achieve his happiness in many ways.  First, it is surely not the case that each and every selfless act will lead to his happiness or to anyone elses happiness.  How can he identify which selfless act will provide anyone's happiness?  For man, the process of identification requires that he use his mind and a successful identification will only occur consistently if he uses his mind rationally.  But the rational use of one's mind is a very personal action.  The process of identifying life-promoting personal values is tough, but how much tougher must this be to try to identify those of numerous others without the ability to even introspect within their minds.  Introspection is a key requirement to identify good values for oneself, but it has little utility for choosing values for others, unless we make the obviously false assumptions that others think very much as we do, have a past history of decisions and choices just like our own, have had the same experiences, and now have the same environment including the same personal relationships with others.

A state of happiness comes from achieving a complex hierarchy of values.  Personal experience and observation of many others tells me that our unachieved values which are our goals are important to us.  They are important to us, even though not achieved, because we have chosen them with recognition of the value we will have when we have achieved them.  Being free to act on our choice itself becomes a great and essential value to us.  But if we cannot identify the hierarchy of values of another complex and highly differentiated individual, how can we know how to act to achieve their happiness?  We do not even have the tools.  We do not have access to the valuing mechanism.

The closest thing to a practical answer seems to be that the other person will tell us what he values and then it will be our responsibility to provide those values to him.  This clearly puts me in a position of slavery to the value demander.  Perhaps it is mutual slavery, since he is required to provide me with my values, if there is any equity in this system at all.  But, if this is the best this system aims to achieve, then why is this better than me pursuing my values and consequent happiness and he pursuing his?

Apparently, throwing more people into the society, each with his or her own set of demands that others will provide them with the requirements for their happiness changes everything.  But, this is ridiculous, even if each of us knew the entire hierarchy of values of every other person and were able to do our pro-rated share to see that each received his list of values.  The result could be no better than if each person pursued his own happiness without initiating the use of force against others.  In reality, the situation is much worse than this.  We each could spend a lifetime just trying to learn what the value hierarchy of each of a relatively small number of people was and then other lifetimes trying to figure out how to divide the effort among us to see that we each did our share to provide the others with their values when they needed or wanted them.

Advocating selfless action as the means to provide oneself or others with happiness is perfect nonsense.  The problem of knowledge of each of our hierarchies of values and of assigning the effort to produce values for others is usually turned over to a government.  That government, to the extent it even tries to do the job, deals with the problem by greatly over-simplifying it.  Lowest common denominator values are chosen by and delivered by some gross political mechanism.  Government adds its inefficiency and its ignorance to the process.  Every effort is botched.  The government becomes huge in the process.  The politicians managing the government lose control of it.  Special interests learn to take advantage of the unwieldy mechanism to find ways to inference and control those parts of the apparatus that will allow them to take advantage of the People.

This result is inevitable.  There is no fix, except that of removing the government from the effort to provide the People with the values they want, with the exception of the value to be free to chose their own values and to manage their own lives.  This is the limited government provided by our Constitution.  This is the legitimate government dedicated only to protecting our equal, sovereign right to life, liberty, property, the ownership of our own minds, bodies, and labor, and the pursuit of our happiness.

Now this is not to say that doing something to provide someone else with a value they want is wrong.  Within each of our self-chosen hierarchy of values will generally be the values we wish to give to those who have value to us.  In recognition of the value that a lover or a friend may have, I may find that giving them a value I have earned is well worth the smile they may give me in return.  Or, it may be a return of an act of generosity on their part.  I may also be happy to give a value to someone I believe to be a deserving person, though I may not have much of a personal relationship with them.  I may choose to do this because it may pain me to see a person I presume or know to be good suffering.  But, in all this, if it is going to contribute to my happiness to act to help make another person happy, it is important that I am acting on my choice and my judgment.  The values I trade or give to others must have the proper position in my personal hierarchy of values, as must the other person.

President, VP and Their Wives Absolutely Dependent on Government

Joe Biden claims that he and the President would have had no chance but for government assistance.  The same was true for their wives, each of whom is smarter than her husband, according to Joe.  He may be right about that one.

Government assistance is not for the poor or the handicapped alone in this new Democrat Socialist dogma.  It is not for only badly abused minorities.  No, it is for the entire middle class as well.  Indeed, the myth they are trying to establish is that it is for everyone, except the 1%ers.  Of course they wish us not to notice that the middle class is paying a big price in unemployment and a loss of improvement in our standard of living.  They want us to fail to notice that a good fraction of the 1%ers have been the beneficiaries of crony mercantilism as well.

Go see Biden and his comments that everyone is a dependent on government here.  What could promote big government better than propagating the belief that we are all helped by government?  As a small business owner and a forever freedom-loving American, it sure is obvious to me that Biden and Obama have mighty mushy brains.  Who in their right minds chooses dependency to a government over the self-management of one's own life?  Why can they not see that dependency is slavery?

Wait?  Are not Joe and Bar-ick (the phonetic pronunciation according to Barack Sr.) 1%ers?  Well of course they are.  Apparently, government made them 1%ers in its great wisdom.