Category My Politics & Discussions

Jan 6 2015

What does President Obama have planned for America?


 

Obama’s America

Many political analysis’s have already written about President Barack Hussein Obama’s, background and early life prior to his famous keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention which propelled him, four years later into the US Presidency in 2008; and made him the world’s most powerful man. Going from a total unknown to US President with no previous accomplishments except writing two books about himself, Dreams from My Father published in 1995 and The Audacity of Hope published in 2006, was unprecedented in US history and it has been attributed only to his being an educated articulate black man, and that must be true since his real background was hidden by the national media so they could say they helped make this historic event happen.   Knowing now what his background was and what he has done over the past 6 years its safe to say that if the 2008 voters had known his anti-American views that he never would have been elected

Obama campaigned on Hope and Change and that he would fundamentally change America; but he never said what the change would be and no one ever bothered to ask him what he really meant by that?

Those of us that dug into his background and saw problems with his views were concerned but anyone that did say anything and had a national voice was quickly demonized and branded a racist and dismissed because the only possible reason for not liking him was his color; but Obama was of two colors his mothers white and his father’s black, so which one didn’t they like? Having any black blood seemed to rule out every other color especially white I guess. But despite all the talk to the contrary his color was never an issue. It was a Red Herring; what was an issue was his anti-American views especially those of Marxism.

Since the 2008 election more has come out about his world views and, in fact two documentary movies were made by Dinesh D’Souza. The first in 2012 2016: Obama’s America and the second in 2014 America: Imagine the World Without Her. But these movies and all the rest were attacked by Obama’s administration and as a result everyone that tried to warn us was neutralized and Obama was elected a second time in 2012. This was somewhat of a surprise since his views for the country were now plain to see and they are of a country very different from what we now have. Those views are from the far left of the Democrat party which now call themselves the “progressives” and these views are based first on the 19th century works of Karl Marks than given more justification by Friedrich Nietzsche than implemented by Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitter and Mao Zedong in different forms and lastly the system was refined by Saul Alinsky and Cloward–Piven in America into a sellable system to the uneducated.

Angelo M. Codevilla in his book The Ruling Class: How they Corrupted America and What We Can Do about It gives his views on how the progressive movement is taking us to a form of government much like a monarchy and this is exactly what Obama is doing. Jonathon Gruber also told us much the same thing, by mistake, when he allowed himself to be recorded when he told his audience that smart people like him could do things in politics because the American people were too stupid to understand what the elites like him were doing. His recordings were on ObamaCare but they were obviously generic views and would apply anywhere. Angelo M. Codevilla warned us and Jonathon Gruber told us they believed that only they were smart enough to rule us; self rule was not possible.

Without getting into details the green/environmental movement of the 70’s gave the progressives the message that they needed that was not linked to Marxism. The movement resulted in 1992 with UN Agenda 21 which couched its message as “sustainability” meaning in this context controlling carbon dioxide which is a requirement for life to even exist so the very context is flawed. UN Agenda 21 is now being implemented across America at the local level e.g. NOACA in Cleveland, Ohio with federal dollars.

To justify the governments views the government poured lots of grant money into research starting in the 90’s and since the researchers knew the results that were wanted they wrote their papers with the “right” message and were paid handsomely. I have personal knowledge of how this grant process works from a Fuel Cell project that I was involved with just after 9/11 with the Department of Defense (DOD) at the Harry Diamond laboratory in Maryland.

UN Agenda 21 gives almost total control of everything in society to the Federal Government and since the want-a-be ruling class wanted a large government to exist this movement was the ticket to everything they wanted. However, things rarely go as planned and this group of want-a-be rulers were ignorant of history and like what happened in the Russia Empire at the end of WW I in 1917 with the February Revolution and the Bolsheviks killed the Czar and all his family they themselves were then disposed and Joseph Stalin became the ruler or Tyrant to be more appropriate.

This kind of brutal take over of a country was in general accordance with the writing of Niccolo Machiavelli in his famous book The Prince. But there is more from the writings of Plato in his book The Republic when he thought there were only Five Forms of Regimes (government) possible which he identified as: Aristocracy, Timocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy and last in the sequence Tyranny. They were to fall in the order written here and Plato went into a long discussion on the how and why. We, in America, today have a Representative Republic and that is a form of a Democracy which always turns into Tyrannies when they fall, typically in 200 to 300 years.

The progressives, knowing that they wanted to change the American system of government, knew that they would have to change American’s belief that their system of government was the best one which is known as American Exceptionalism. The theory of the Exceptionalism of the U.S. can be traced to Alexis de Tocqueville, the first writer to describe the country as “exceptional” in 1831 and 1840. The change to this believe started when the ACLU was first formed by communists but the major changes were done by President Johnson in 1964/65 with his 84 major pieces of legislation called the Great Society. Johnson’s legislation gave the politicians the tools to create a range of new departments and agencies most after he left office from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Department of Homeland Security, but one of the first the Department of Education in 1979 is what did the most damage as it gave the Federal Government the leverage to control what was taught from k-12 though a PhD.

That control has lead to Political Correctness, Hate Speech and multiculturalism which were used to change history and by doing so we have multiple America’s now ranging from white American, black America, Hispanic America, Muslim America, LGBT America, and female America to name just a few. There are more but you get the picture and what this has done is split the country into a host of factions that are all at odds with each other. A famous political writer in France Montesquieu wrote a book The Spirit of the laws where he basically stated that there can only be one form of government in a society and that if you want to change the form of the government you first need to change the sentiments of the people and that is why so much effort was put into the education system over the past 60 years.

This effort has now destroyed the belief in the American system of government and rewritten the history of the country into one of oppression rather than freedom. With the last two generations corrupted the change to a different supposed fairer system will not be hard and the start of this change is what Obama is all about, what those that want change have not learned from history is that change in any form always ends in a bloody revolution; which today would mean an internal second American Civil War. Based on current events the final push to make the changes they want will occur between 2015 and 2020 but more likely in the next two years before Obama is out of office.

There is justification in social theory for this Change of Obama’s, the most recent work on this subject was written by William Straus and Neil Howe in their book the Forth Turning published in 1997 which describes an upheaval in America which will end in either an internal or an external major war. Their theory is based on a reoccurring 80 to 90 year social pattern in Western Civilization where the last one was WW II which started in Asia in 1937 and Europe in 1939, add 80 to 1938 and you get 2018; however the cycles which go back to the Wars of the Roses in England fought between 1455 to 1487 have gotten shorter over the past 100 or so years. In any case the social turmoil that we are now in was predicted in the book back in 1997 going on 20 years ago. Obama is only doing what someone does every 80 to 90 years according to Straus and Howe.

What those that want to rule have always wanted is a Federal Government based on a single unelected (in practice) group of elites. This can take many forms from the past Monarchies to the present communist Central Committee. Both systems have the same exact method of rule where a single group of the citizens control all or almost all of the country’s social systems. No matter what the actual system the sovereign resides in the leader(s) of the group, committee or party and there are few to no limits placed on their power and no means to remove them from office. Today in America those that want the power or more correctly the sovereign need to find a way to consolidate their power and then change or get rid of the US constitution which places limits on what the Federal Government can do.

The following is one way the elites could consolidate power into a single party and then change the US constitution. There are progressives in both the Republican and Democratic parties and their views are not much different so if there would be enough of them that say in the US Senate of the 100 Senators there would be 60 Progressives 10 Democrats and 40 Republicans and in the House of Representatives of the 435 seats there would be 290 Progressives and 15 Democrats and 130 Republicans that would give the Progressives a 2/3’s majority in both houses which would mean that there is no law or Amendment to the US constitution that they could not propose and if they had the presidency as well the proposed Amendments could be easily adopted. James Madison the writer of the US constitution in Federalist 47 (old 46) warned us that if a faction controlled all three branches of the Federal Government that they could than do anything they wanted and that would be the very definition of a Tyranny. He hoped this would never happen.

An example of this almost happened in 2008 when Obama was elected since at the same time the Democrats /progressives had control of the House of Representatives and the US Senate and they passed the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) Public law 111-148 without a single Republican vote because Obama in his arrogance claimed he was the winner and the Republicans no longer mattered. Since the citizens didn’t want this Health Care change they rebelled and in the 2010 off year election the Democrats were swept out of the House of Representatives by a landside wave election created by the populist “Tea” Party.

Now continuing with what Obama wants, the selling of this concept of a new political party would not be easy so if there were a crises of sorts, real or made up, this faction of Progressives could conspire to reform the old Democratic Republican Party that existed form 1791 to 1825, almost to the American Civil War, which in the turmoil prior to that war the Democratic Republican Party basically spit into the present day Democratic and Republican Parties. Since this party had Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson as its leaders this may not be that hard of a sell.

What this concept would do is create the illusion of a broad based center party by throwing out the “perceived” extremes like the radical left and the Tea Party right and making them meaningless distractions to the new American center party of the founders, the newly formed Democratic Republican Party. This could be accomplished by 2016 and if this new faction could get a president elected, which would seem likely, this faction would have total control of the country.

Could this be pulled off without a Civil War maybe but when the US Constitutional changes were proposed and possibly made, I think Civil War would be unavoidable. If Civil War ensued the result would be devastation and million could die in the conflict but those that want power don’t care as history has repeated shown going back thousands of years.

What is it that these power seekers want that they would destroy a country for? Well it’s an elusive dream that many want but few ever get and then when they do they find that they can’t keep it for very long.   What the Progressives like Obama and his friends like George Soros want is a system like China has with the Communist Central Committee of 205 full members and 171 alternate members and a tightly controlled private sector. You can see that it’s tightly control with only 205 people ruling a country of an estimated 1.36 billion people. What those in power don’t see is that the only reason that China grew so quickly wasn’t the Chinese government it was the American businesses moving everything that they had relating to production to China as quickly as they could to lower production costs. There isn’t much more other than natural resources left here that anyone wants so if American ends up in a Civil War it’s also possible that the country that is left becomes nothing but a source of raw materials and the impoverished Americans living in third world conditions.

How this plays out and what happens to America is basically in the Hands of the American officer Corps for they alone have the authority and means to prevent this take over from happening. This is so because In the Commissioned Officers Oath of Office are the words … (I) do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God. (DA Form 71, 1 August 1959, for officers.)

The interesting thing about this current oath is that it does not mention the president who is the Commander nor any other rank in the military. In essence each officer is obligated to personally defend the US Constitution; and in so doing he/she does not have to obey any orders from superiors, in fact, that obligation is specifically omitted. Why this is important is that if the US Constitution was not being followed by the President or the Congress the military could remove them from office and this would not be against their sworn duty. Nor would it be illegal since these officers have the ability to do so as they command the US Military this is a sacred duty given only to them.

The legal basis for this is found in the first law of the United States of America, enacted in the first session of the first Congress on 1 June 1789, and which was statute 1, chapter 1: an act to regulate the time and manner of administering certain oaths, which established the oath required by civil and military officials to support the Constitution. The founding fathers were very concerned about protecting our Constitution and their last line of defense when all else failed was the US Military which allowed the US Constitution to be put in place when the American revolution was successful and British were defeated on October 19, 1781 and the country was established.

In closing this is, of course, all speculation: however I have made a concerted effort since 9/11 to understand why our world is falling apart and so this paper is nothing but the extrapolation of what I have been studying for the past dozen years as I became more and more concerned over the countries near term future.

I would hope that the coming conflict is not as bad as the American Civil War or World War Two but since there are so many warring factions in the world today, and many have nuclear weapons, all we can hope for is that God will protect us from the worst of what might happen.

Lastly this work leaves much out as a full discussion would require a full book; so keeping this in mind please excuse this summary of my thoughts without full documented discussion and sourcing. However I have added a number of hyperlinks to this paper which should help with the documentation.

Jun 27 2014

Obama’s Transformation is almost completed


But the results will not be what he expected

The American government has been infiltrated by the Muslin brotherhood which was formed in Egypt decades ago and this has created a major conflict. The Brotherhood are Sunni Muslims who are 80% of the Muslims and they have no love for the Shea Muslims who are less than 20% of the Muslims. The conflict that arises is that Iran is predominantly Shea and the Saudis and the ISIS are Sunni; and the more fundamental Muslims e.g. the ISIS want to reestablish a Caliphate which rules using Sharia Law. The problems that the Muslims have and therefore this administration has is that Sharia Law is basically what existed in the Arabian peninsula when Mohamed started the Islamic beliefs which made the then existing tribal habits customs or laws of the 7th century inhabitants of that part of the world into unchangeable religious dogma. Sharia Law is TOTALLY INCOMPATIBLE with Western Civilization and that is indisputable fact that even the American founding fathers including the Progressives favorite, Thomas Jefferson understood.

When Obama and his Progressive/Marxist followers started the policies of Fundamental Transformation of America they also believed that this transformation could be spread worldwide and since their handlers in the Muslim Brotherhood supported this view the Arab Spring was initiated. The Brotherhood wanted the existing leaders removed since they were not true believers in the new Caliphate that they wanted. I would not be surprised to learn that they also had an influence in the Bush administration for the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein; although I do not belief that Bush had anything but the best interests for America as he was not looking to Fundamentally Transform the country.

Off the subject but relevant is that the Cloward-Piven strategy is what Obama is using to change the country and it is, to first cause a breakdown of the society that you want to change by using it against itself. It this case to use environmental and social policies to destroy the middle class by making it to easy to not work and by putting so many regulations in place that the small business go under. I drive a lot in Cleveland and I see hundreds of abandoned buildings and store fronts in all parts of the city.

Because of the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports their numbers many if not most of those closing business to not show in the official monthly numbers; this segment has taken a large hit since 2007 and has not recovered. Neither has the good production section recovered and again a large percentage of the middle class was employed there. There are now (4,625,800) fewer people earning a living today in good paying jobs then in 2007 and the 3,816,400 increase in mostly lower paying jobs leaves a net loss of over (809,440) jobs.

To achieve this reduction in jobs the federal government, not counting the Post Office, has been increased by 8.6% or 168,300 jobs presumably these are mostly in Washington DC and are good paying jobs. So one could say that for every federal job created we lost almost 5 private sector jobs, and the transformation is not over.

As the middle class jobs are eliminated more goods have to be produced in China, India and else ware to make up the difference and that means more borrowing from those countries to pay for those goods and services. Since October 2007 $3,892,702,000,000 has been borrowed from these countries and when added to domestic borrowing the total borrowed is $8,437,873,000,000 more debt since then.

So one could say that to get rid of one good paying job we had to borrow $10,424,334 a good return for someone but not the middle class.

The reduction in jobs and the increase in debt is a direct result of the policies of those running the government as they try to move us from a market based system to a central planning based system. There are many of us that don’t think that will turn out well but the voters have spoken and this is therefore either what they want or they have partaken of the Kool Aid.

It cannot be dismissed that the Brotherhood may have contributed to this transformation but whether it was or not the transformation has been done and the result will be a diminished American economy and world presence; which leaves a power vacuum which must be filled to re-stabilize the world. The last time this happened was in the 1920-1930’s and that resulted in WW II. If one wants to look at patterns one would say that a major war must happen and that the most likely date is 2018; and it will probably be with the Muslims’ since this administration has given them the opening that they need. The Brotherhoods influence in our government makes it impossible to counter this infiltration without being accused of being anti-Muslim so the deck has been dealt and the cards are all in the hands of the players and its only how they will be played that will determine the winner.

But we also know that the Obama administration is severely deficient in the quality of the strategic thinking ability of its members so it’s very unlikely they can play their cards to a good outcome ….

May 18 2014

What Started Us Down the Path of Destruction to Our Constitution?


I am in the final stages of publishing a book exposing the false claims that mankind is destroying the planet by the use of fossil fuels i.e. coal, oil and natural gas. The lies that have been told on this subject put the lies of Hitler and Goebbels into the league of rank amateurs. But like those two infamous Politicians those Politicians today that practice those same arts of lies and deceit have the same motives in mind; absolute power over the people.

When I became a Green Beret one of the things I was taught as an officer, besides the arts of war, was how to bring down a government for that was our original mission.  So today when I see what is being done in America I see that there are those that are doing what I was taught to do. The only way to counter that is with the truth and that is the purpose of this blog as I stated in my About section.

The wedge that those that desire “power” are using against us is “CLIMATE CHANGE” that we are told is caused by too many people and using too much energy therefore we are not sustainable. The truth is that the climate has always changed and that there isn’t enough carbon based fuels on the planet to do what they claim will happen. The original projections of doom and gloom have continued to be pushed into the future as we reach points in time where the disasters were to happen and they were not there. The latest IPCC assessment AR5 does this again. So what follows is a section from the introduction of the book I am written to destroy this travesty against our way of life.

The belief that CO2 is causing climate change on the planet by raising the planet’s temperature came primarily from the late 1960’s. The belief was that the increased temperatures, from CO2, would then change the world’s climate patterns which would then result in the melting of the world’s glaciers, increased storms and probably loss of valuable crop lands by rising sea levels. The implied result on the world’s civilizations will be catastrophic and therefore there will be a significant loss of life from both the climate change and the probable wars that will be fought over dwindling resources.

To prevent this from happening the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, having met at Stockholm from 5 to 16 June 1972, made a statement part of which is, “… having considered the need for a common outlook and for common principles to inspire and guide the peoples of the world in the preservation and enhancement of the human environment …” and then they established a set of principles and an international forum, the first of which was held in Rio de Janiero in June 1992 and then later Kyoto in 1997 where goals for a reduction in the CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels primarily from petroleum, coal and natural gas were agreed to by the parties. Efforts to date have been totally unsuccessful and the CO2 levels have now reached 400 ppm and the rate of growth is increasing at an accelerating rate that is currently above ~2 ppm per year.

The first major program to began the task of changing how the entire world would adapt to the “required” reductions in Carbon Dioxide was made public at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (Earth-Summit), held in Rio-de-Janeiro on June 13, 1992, where 178 governments voted to adopt the program called UN Agenda 21. The final text was the result of drafting, consultation, and negotiation, beginning in 1989 and culminating at the two-week conference. Agenda 21 is a 300-page document divided into 40 chapters that have been grouped into 4 sections that was published in book form the following year:

Section I: Social and Economic Dimensions is directed toward combating poverty, especially in developing countries, changing consumption patterns, promoting health, achieving a more sustainable population, and sustainable settlement in decision making.

Section II: Conservation and Management of Resources for Development Includes atmospheric protection, combating deforestation, protecting fragile environments, conservation of biological diversity (biodiversity), control of pollution and the management of biotechnology, and radioactive wastes.

Section III: Strengthening the Role of Major Groups includes the roles of children and youth, women, NGOs, local authorities, business and industry, and workers; and strengthening the role of indigenous peoples, their communities, and farmers.

Section IV: Means of Implementation: implementation includes science, technology transfer, education, international institutions and financial mechanisms.

The goal of UN Agenda 21 is to create a world economic system that equalizes world incomes and standards of living and at the same time reduces Carbon Dioxide levels back to the levels that existed prior to the industrial age of ~300 ppm. We are now at 400 ppm and growing at a geometrically increasing rate now a bit over 2 ppm per year and at that rate we will reach 500 ppm in 2050 at which point the UN Climate models and there spokespersons Al Gore and James Hansen say we will have an ecological and economic disaster that is irreversible.

There are only two ways to achieve this reduction back to their ideal ~300 ppm and they are not mutual exclusive. One is to reduce the world’s population and the other is to either reduce energy consumption or make a switch to non carbon burning fuels such as solar PV or wind turbines. Agenda 21 is the driver for all the sustainability programs that are being implemented at this time in the United States and the European Union; which mean that if the belief that Carbon Dioxide is the ultimate reason for changes in global climate is not true, that untold trillions of dollars and massive economic restructuring would be unwarranted.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) we are using about 500 Quad of energy world wide right now of which maybe 15% is classed as sustainable, and there are estimated to be 7.0 billion people on the planet. That means that 425 Quad of energy usage is not sustainable and the world’s population could reach 9.0 billion by 2050. By then we would be using 900 Quad of energy at current growth trends of which probably 650 Quad will not be sustainable if nothing major changes. The goal of Agenda 21 is therefore to find ways to reduce the number of people or significantly reduce how much energy they use. Carbon taxes and the redistribution of wealth from rich countries to poor countries are the means to achieve this but there are no engineers on the planet that would say it would be possible to produce 650 Quad of sustainable generating capacity in 35 years (335% more than now), especially since no real effort has yet been made. And some of the “sustainable” categories are mutually exclusive e.g. growing plants for ethanol verses food.

To put this in perspective if we could make 250 Quad of reliable sustainable generating capacity annually that would mean that we could not have more than 1 billion people (actually the goal seems to be about half of that) on the planet and even those would not be able to live as well as we in the US do now. Prior to the 2008 financial collapse the US used about 100 Quad and had 300 million people. If the goal is 250 quad and 1 billion people that would mean a 25% reduction in the standard of living for all the advanced socialites. Since this is what is “required” to achieve the stated goals of preventing 500 ppm from happening it’s very obvious that there is a major problem brewing.

How did all this negativism about our future come about? Well actually it started in 1798 when Thomas Robert Malthus (b-1766 to d-1834) who was a cleric in the Church of England and a famous Classical English economist published his An Essay on the Principle of Population. This work and understanding it is critical to understanding our current situation. From Wikipedia we have the following. Malthus argued in his Essay (1798) that population growth generally expanded in times and in regions of plenty until the size of the population relative to the primary resources caused distress:

“Yet in all societies, even those that are most vicious, the tendency to a virtuous attachment is so strong that there is a constant effort towards an increase of population. This constant effort as constantly tends to subject the lower classes of the society to distress and to prevent any great permanent amelioration of their condition”.

—Malthus T.R. 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Chapter II, p 18 in Oxford World’s Classics reprint.

Malthus argued that two types of checks hold population within resource limits: positive checks, which raise the death rate; and preventive ones, which lower the birth rate. The positive checks include hunger, disease and war; the preventive checks, abortion, birth control, prostitution, postponement of marriage and celibacy. In later editions of his essay, Malthus clarified his view that if society relied on human misery to limit population growth, then sources of misery (e.g., hunger, disease, and war) would inevitably afflict society, as would volatile economic cycles. On the other hand, “preventive checks” to population that limited birthrates, such as later marriages, could ensure a higher standard of living for all, while also increasing economic stability. Malthus also argued against a variety of imaginable solutions, such as the notion that agricultural improvements could expand without limit and that would also prevent this from happening.

Of the relationship between population and economics, Malthus wrote that when the population of laborers grows faster than the production of food, real wages fall because the growing population causes the cost of living (i.e., the cost of food) to go up. Difficulties of raising a family eventually reduce the rate of population growth, until the falling population again leads to higher real wages. In the second and subsequent editions Malthus put more emphasis on moral restraint as the best means of easing the poverty of the lower classes.

Despite facts to the contrary as science found ways to provide more food from less land, the limitation of the world’s population has been the goal of many thinkers ever since. Today that view started by Malthus is promoted by the Club of Rome which was founded in 1968 about the same time as all the other like organizations started. From this group and others like it a one world government has been promoted which would be run by the world’s intellectual elites and they would limit growth and population to achieve a level that they believe is sustainable.

There are many scientists in the world that do not agree with the conclusions of the IPCC, not necessarily from bad science but from a lack of sufficient knowledge of all the relevant variables and the lack of computers of a sufficient capability to properly process the number of equations that would be required. Many of these scientists also believe that the world’s temperature is primarily controlled by other factors than CO2. The problem has been showing a provable theory based on science and physics on how this might occur and how could this alternative explanation be used to predict future global temperatures.

In this book we will show that properly constructed mathematical modeling can be used to predict world temperature with significantly greater accuracy than the IPCC computer models. The reason that the model proposed here is more accurate is that it is based on past changes in temperatures that have been observed and have documented patterns and those patterns have a reoccurring cycle. When those patterns are broken down into their simplest from and then properly modeled and plotted into the future it is found that the resultant model’s predictions match very closely with the observed world temperatures as published monthly by NASA.

 

Mar 11 2014

The Responsibilities of the Citizens and the Press


The unsaid understanding of the Constitution

The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 ended with a Proposal to Change the existing Articles of Confederation to the Constitution that we now have.  There was a procedure to make changes in the Articles just as there is in the present Constitution and so a national debate ensued. On one side were those that wanted a stronger agreement between the states to solve existing problems; on the other side were those that felt the proposed Constitution went too far.  Those for the Constitution were the Federalists and those that were not (as written) were the Anti-Federalists. The compromise to get the votes necessary to make the change, were what we now know as the Bill-of-Rights which are the first 10 amendments to the constitution. Specifically they were a listing of things that the Federal Government could not do or had no jurisdiction over, the reason these were enacted as the first order of business of the new government was that the citizens, who had just fought the American Revolutionary War, did not want a Ruling Class to take over and negate what so many had just died for.  We would call this process consensus today as everybody got enough of what they thought was needed to get all 13 states to agree, albeit it was a long process lasting until 9th state ratified it on June 8, 1778 making it legal by the terms of the Articles. Four years later Vermont, the last state, ratified the Constitution making it all thirteen.

The first Amendment of the Constitution was of a guarantee of various fundamental freedoms; of freedom of religion, of free speech, a free press, the right to assemble, and the right to petition the government.  This was very important and so it was the first of what ended up being the Bill-of-Rights.

That held for almost 200 years and then we became spoiled and forgetful and to trusting of our elected representatives and we are where we are now with a congress, both the House and the Senate, and President and Vice President that have desires to nullify much of the Constitution and Bill-of-Rights.  These 537 elected representatives, both political parties, are now trying to tell 317,674,000 Americans (when this was written) that they know better than we do how to live our lives. Most families have issues managing 3 or 4 individuals so to assume that, that so few a number could manage the most complex economy that ever existed is frankly absurd.

There were three checks to the concentration of Federal power. The first was a knowledgeable citizenry, the next were the states themselves, and the last was the press. The Free Press was the last defense for maintaining a free country.  Their duty was to question and research everything the government was doing and to assume that there were nefarious reasons for anything that they proposed.  There should have been no distinction as to who was in power as all of them are human and we all have the same faults, self interest.

The politicians are no different from any of us and if given the opportunity they will find ways to gain power and influence. One of the ways they do this is to convince us that they are different from any of the rest of us, how that would be possible I’m not sure since they have the same DNA as we do.  According to them Businessmen and Financiers are all corrupt and they need to be managed by them. This would be no different from letting the Fox guard the hen house. The people in the government and the people in private business are identical and many go back and forth between the two sectors.  The only difference between the two is if a business does not provide a service or product you don’t like you don’t buy it and with no sales they go out of business.  In the public sector what you want does not matter it’s what the government will give you that you will get and if they need more money they tax you, which is not a choice you will pay them what they want.

The free Press is now incapable of doing its job, for various reasons, and so the citizens are not aware of what has been going for the past twenty some years.  The problem is that there are a host of very fundamental changes in play now in this country; it’s unlikely, in my opinion, that many of these “fundamental” changes will be successful and that will result in a high probability of economic collapse.

What is left of the free press will be one of the first to go. Unless they wake up!

Mar 6 2014

The Repeating Cycles of Social Time


A Major War is Coming!

Strauss and Howe in their 1997 book The Fourth Turning An American Prophecy outline how social or political time runs in cycles. There is much they have to say in their book and much of that goes all the way back to the Roman times where they find the name for this cycle from the Romans and it’s a Saeculum meaning a long human life of 80 to 90 years. This Saeculum is composed of 4 generations of about 20 some years each. Read the book for the full analysis which is very compelling but for here the salient point is near the end of each Saeculum there is a major war, no exceptions.

The cycles they identify go back to England and the war of the Roses 1459 to 1487 and since then there have been five complete cycles and we are now in the final stages of the sixth cycle which according to them ends around 2025 plus or minus a few years. This period that we are now in is the fourth turning (a turning meaning going from one generation to the other in the Saeculum) hence the name of the book. They can pin down the basic times that all this occurs because these changes have repeated themselves for 555 years now.

The last three major wars going back from the present were: WW II from 1941 to 1945; the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865 and then the American Revolution from 1775 to 1783. The civil war started 86 years after the American Revolution; WW II started 80 years after the Civil War started. The scary thing right now is that 80 years from 1941 is 2021 which is a likely start for the next major world war. However over all the Saeculum’s since the War of the Roses have been getting progressively shorter so that 80 years may not be a good guess.

Straussand Howe are not the only ones to see the pattern but even still they go to great lengths to show why it occurs and how many other sociologists have also seen all or some of the pattern they have identified in their book. I read the book after it came out in 98 or 99 and thought it was interesting and put in on my book shelf. After 9/11 I went back and read the book again since I remembered that they talked about that kind of an event happening around 2005. Since then I’ve read it a couple more times and I am now convinced they are right on and a major war is now eminent.

So based on current events (read my previous post on the Ukraine) which seem to parallel the years before WW II started, actually in 1938 in Europe, we can make a case for the next world war to start any time from 2016 to no later than 2022.

Feb 20 2014

Does God have a Place in Government?


The Founders Believed that it was Required

We have been conditioned today into believing that in the United States of America there is a wall between the church and the government — “The Separation of Church and State” — as it is now called.  Further we are told that this comes from our founding documents so it must be true — but is it? In searching those documents we find that those words or any derivation of them do not appear in any of the founding documents. But we also know that the use of the words God or the Creator (used inter-changeably here) and a fundamental belief in God was very important to the founders and that they reference God a lot in their writing and God was very prominent in all the public buildings; Federal, State and Local until after World War II. So how did we get from a nation founded on the belief in God to a secular state that can’t even acknowledging the existence of God?

Much, but not all, of this change can be traced to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its influence on the legal system up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court.  The ACLU was founded by Crystal Eastman, Roger Baldwin and Walter Nelles (an interesting fact is that Nelles has ties to what becomes the infamous ‘Students for a Democratic Society’  from the 60’s) who were all avid socialists and in all probability, communists at heart, if not in practice.  It could be said that they used their beliefs in what is called social justice today, to destroy the influence of religion since religion was deemed to be bad by Karl Marx, the founder of the principles of communism and the precursor of modern socialism.  Since the communist movement was very strong when these three were growing up this is a likely connection. Why else would so many of the court cases promoted by the ACLU be used to drive a wedge between the religious people of this country and their government; especially in the public schools of the country? The result is that ever since shortly after the end of WW II, we have been moving away from God.  God is no longer “fashionable”.

By what logic could this transformation be done? There must have been something that those wishing to change the American System found to give them an opportunity to make the change they desired. And there was; in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to a Baptist Association he wrote: “… I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” Jefferson reflected his frequently as a speaking theme that the government is not to interfere with religion.

Jefferson in his misused reference was of course referring to the national or federal government which was proscribed in the First Amendment to not interfere with religion and specifically not establish a “state” religion.  This Amendment, part of the ‘Bill-of Rights,’ was written to keep the federal government out of the states and local communities where they, the local government could do as they pleased.  Meaning the people there could have their local government participate in religious activities without being dictated to, one way or the other, by the federal government.  Since for almost 200 years this principle held and the federal government used religion itself although non denominational it is hard to see how this has been turned around to what we have today.  We are constantly hearing how some religious item such as the Ten Commandments are being removed from public buildings as being offensive to the citizens. How did they get there then and be there for so long? Further if the founding fathers didn’t agree with how this issue was handled in the first few decades of the republic they would have changed something; since they did not this is prima fascia evidence that the ‘new’ interpretation is false.

However, with the ACLU now in full get religion out of the government mode they used Jefferson’s comments, out of context, to argue a case at United States Supreme Court and they were successful in 1947 by a 5 to 4 ruling in the Everson vs Board of Education case in stopping a state from using public funds for transporting student to a faith based school. The result of this ruling is directly responsibly for all that followed.

This view is absurd on face — since we know that in political theory the belief in a Supreme Being was a major requirement to have a viable Democratic Republic. This view is in all the political writing of the eighteenth century and very clearly stated by those writers for example Adam Smith and John Lock since only a moral (religious) people could vote for representatives to their legislative bodies and end up having representatives that were moral. In most societies dating back to earliest recorded history, people got their sense of morality from religion.  Therefore, if we did not have morality in public life, the representatives we elect would become corrupt and the government would become oppressive.  We see this corruption happening now in our country and it is my opinion that this is a direct result of removing God from the public conscious and in fact making belief in any God a target for ridicule and cheap humor by politicians and certainly those in the media and entertainment industry.

So, that gives us the basis for the rest of this discussion on God and Government and why the two cannot be separated in the sense that it now is; that is if we are to continue to remain a free people.

At the core, there are only two kinds of governments.  The first is based on the existence of a “creator”, or prime mover.    The second is purely secular and proposes a “random spontaneous life” argument. Monarchies, democracies, republics and dictatorships, free markets, communism and fascism all have their roots in one of these systems.  But first we need to understand the basis for where the law used to govern us originates.

After reading many books and other material on government: John Lock, Adman Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Pain, Thomas Hobbes, Charles-Louis Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to name a few, we find that some basic principles as to God and Government can be developed.  I have drawn my conclusions and beliefs from these writings and present my interpretation below. However, any mistakes in interpreting their views are entirely of my own invention.  Due to time and space restrictions, I have regrettably omitted many others philosophers and scholars that have contributed over centuries to the principle views held during the eighteenth century when our country was founded.  I mean them no disrespect and it’s only my late coming to this subject that prevents me from a more complete listing.

The first form of government is that which is based on natural law and natural law is that which man can see in nature, though the use of reason, because the Creator, God, put it there when he created the universe.  Man in the state of nature (meaning there is no government) is sovereign in himself; in that he has made no oath to serve another man nor entered into any compact to share that power so he alone can control what he does or does not do.  This is what gives the meaning to the sovereign which is simply put that there is no law above the person that has the sovereign. Therefore this man in nature has the sovereign power and it must come directly from God.  He is his own master free to do as he pleases within the framework of what the creator made available to him.

In this state of nature with no government all men are therefore equal and they control their own lives, what they do or don’t do. They do everything they do in the belief that it is in their self interest to provide for their existence (food, water, shelter etc).  But men soon found that two could do more than one and three more than two and so they would share the fruits of their combined labor in some agreed upon manner.  This might work for one or two or even three men but in a larger group of men, who would decide on the division of labor and division of the fruits of their labors?  In all probability the strongest and/or the smartest would get the others to cede power and authority.

At that point what is called a ‘social contract’ was formed, and since protection would be one of the primary goals of this contract, that was typically the reason that this person was given the right of leadership.  In so doing, individuals had effectively transferred their sovereign to that leader and he now held ‘only’ what they had given him by consent.  By the early eighteenth century it was thought that once the sovereign was given to a leader, it stayed with that leader or his heirs permanently.  However starting with the Magna Carta and solidifying in the mid 18th century other ideas became prominent and they were very different.  The new belief was that if those that made the laws (called the magistrates) did not serve the people, then the people had the right to take back the sovereign power and form a new government. The historical logic and writing of this is a bit more complex than what I present here but in general that is the core principle. The US War of Independence and French Revolution, although very different, are prime examples.

From this line of thought comes our Declaration of Independence and the first two paragraphs are shown next.  I have added bold to the key provisions.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them 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.

What follows next in the Declaration is a listing of the grievances which aren’t necessary for this discussion, and so we skip to the last paragraph.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

From this we can state the following, in the Creator based form of governance:

ONE. There is a Creator — a God that created the universe and all that is in it.

TWO. The Creator gives us our rights through natural law, such as: the right to life, liberty and property. These rights being God given cannot be taken away.

THREE. We cede the administration of those rights by our government in return for the government’s agreement to protect us and insure equal justice.

FOUR. The agreement between the People and the government is the social contract and in our case is embodied in the Constitution.

FIVE. The proof of the above is in the oath of office of elected office holders and military personnel, especially the officer corps.  They swear an oath to defend the Constitution, not the government.

SIX. Therefore the sovereign that the people possess resides not in the government but in the Constitution itself.

SEVEN. The People cannot give the government what they did not have and so a government based on the sovereign given by the people cannot do anything that the people did not specifically give the government or that they had in their power to give.

EIGHT. The Constitution can only be changed by the process defined within it and so since a procedure for change is contained in the document there can be no justification for interpreting in anyway other than the way it was originally written.  It is a living document.  However, only the people can change it, not the legislators the executives or the judges. A Constitutional change can be made by a 2/3’s vote of approval of the various States so the people can change their government any time if they desire.

NINE. If a politician does not follow his oath to defend the Constitution and in fact states that he believes that it is no longer valid, he has broken his oath and must be removed from office.  The procedure for doing this is impeachment.

TEN. If the government does not follow the guidelines of the Constitution it is the duty of the citizens either to elect new representatives or to form a new government.

This then is the basis of our form of government which is called a Federal Republic or sometimes a Constitutional Republic.  We are a federation of states with elected representatives and they govern based on the limits of power we have given them as defined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.  It was assumed that those elected would be believers in God, primarily Christians of any of the various denominations.  Since the country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles for a Judeo-Christian people, The Constitution as written would only work for a society with those values.  If the People’s beliefs have changed then the form of the government would have to change as well — this would be a fundamental change.

The other form of government is very different. This form is not based on a belief in God but is purely secular in nature. This is not to say that the people don’t have religion, only that it plays no part in their government.  In this form the sovereign resides in the government and how it got there matters not.  There may be elections and there may not be, but one thing is common and that is that there is a “ruling class” and a “class that is ruled”.  Those in power come from the historical vestiges of wars, revolutions, dynasties, feudal societies or wealth.  The common man may or may not live reasonably well but he is the common man and a change in class status is uncommon and unlikely.

Typically in these governments the documents that form the government are not fixed nor are they based on natural law.  This means that those that rule can change anything they desire for any reason they desire.  They can do this because there are no real limits placed on them as might exist in a true Constitutional government.  Their usual oaths of office are to swear allegiance to the primary ruler; be it a King, Queen, Emperor or Party Leader.  You can see that if an oath is given to the ruler then there is no recourse available if that leader turns bad.  An oath is an oath and must be honored.

In this form of government the people have no real power, the rulers are hand picked from among those in the ruling class and the government appoints a much higher percentage of the workers in the legislative branches and local administrators in the various functions of government.  This is not to say that these people are oppressed or without any benefits, for that is not the case in most governments today.  But the amount of true freedom they have depends on the exact form of their government which can be a social democracy an aristocratic democracy and or one of the other forms such as would be found in a communist state or even a monarchy or a dictatorship.  Outside the United States this is the form most other people live under.

In any event, they have no God given rights of any kind, only those rights that the state and its ruler allows them to have; today meaning ‘Positive Rights’ as exposed by our current president. These forms of government are not stable.  They may last for a hundred years but few last much longer without some form of revolution or civil war that changes the form of that government. Some would say that we had a civil war so why are we different?

The difference is that the issue of slavery was put aside initially to gain freedom from the British Crown.  Because slavery, which was common in the world, (in fact the word Slave comes from Slav, due to the fact that in the Middle Ages a vast number of Europeans were regularly taken into slavery by raiding Ottomans’ and Arabs and carted off to Africa and the Middle East) was an anathema to a system based on freedom, there was considerable opposition to it that needed to be resolved before the new country could move forward. This was largely resolved by the Civil War, although cultural artifacts remained for years afterward.  Further, the essential form of our government did not change.

From this we can state the following in the Secular form of governance:

ONE. There may or may not be a Creator, but whether there is or not is not material to the governance of man.

TWO. Once a government is formed by a people, that government has ‘all’ the sovereign power and can make any laws that it choices to.

THREE. Therefore there is no ‘real’ limit to the power of this form of government.

Four. Whether there is a founding document or not is not relevant in this form of government since the government has the absolute sovereign which can not be taken back other than by a revolution.

Five. All the rights of the people come from the government and are only what it allows them to have.

SIX. In most if not all cases the public servants swear an oath to the head of the government not to their founding documents.

SEVEN. Further, since there is no direct link to a creator there are no natural laws and without natural laws there are no fixed morals.  This is called moral relativism.

EIGHT. Without a moral base there is no way to measure good or evil and without a way to measure good and evil a leader or ruler can justify any action they desire in that it is only his opinion as to what is good for the country that counts.

NINE. The lack of a frame of reference for the morals of the people in this form of government mean that at some point the government will become oppressive.

TEN. In these kinds of governments there is strong trend to a state of minimum personal freedom.

So in summary, we have the first model of governance which allocates power in this order: God, the individual, then government. We have a second model, Secular Governance, which allocates power first to the government then to the individual.  In the first form God is the primary source of power and in the second form the government is the primary source of power.  Since we know from thousands of years of history that men can be corrupted, and they often are, why would anyone want a government based solely on the wishes of what a man would want?

Some would say today that we are an enlightened people now and the old ways of the founders and the restraints of our constitution are no loner needed.  To them I say they are wrong.  History has repeated itself many times with great republics formed and then lost to the corruption of men and their government.  There can be no rational basis for this belief other than one of our ignorance of history.

We can either believe in the ways of Christ, which were non violent in the New Testament and can be summed up in the statement, “Do onto others as you would have them do unto you” or you can have a belief that men can make better rules of living and behavior then those of nature’s Creator.  You can either believe in God or believe in man as the source of understanding, but not both.

The Founders believed in a Christian God as found in our Bible.  The government they established was one that had those beliefs at its core.  Being men we are not perfect and so neither was our conduct neither in the formation of the country nor in the application of our government.  However, despite our faults and misdirection in our Constitution we formed the best system yet devised by man.  And, during the debate on the form of that document, a major impasse came to be with arguments back and forth and hard positions being taken.   With no compromises possible Benjamin Franklin proposed that they all pray to God for guidance.  They all went to a nearby church and did as he suggested.  Coming back the mood was completely changed and compromises to the things that separated them were found.  In short order thereafter we had the Constitution; so was this the work of God or do we want to believe that it was pure chance?  Given the results of what that divinely inspired document produced, at least until now, it is clear that we were destined to be a force of good in the world — the Beacon of Freedom that all looked to for guidance.  We do not need to be fundamentally changed.

Ronald Reagan, “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

Feb 20 2014

Justification of a Modern Government


From Aquinas to Rousseau

This is a very brief summary of the basis of our government and in my opinion this process started in earnest between 1259 and 1264 in Paris France when St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 -1274) wrote Summa Contra Gentiles (The Summa Against the Gentiles) which is considered to be a seminal work perhaps the best of the middle ages.  In this work he blends the then newly discovered works of Plato and Aristotle, which had been lost to Europe since the fall of Rome, along with Roman law and the teachings of Christianity into one work. There is no doubt that he was a man of very high intellect and even today, 750 years later, his work should be read by anyone interested in the foundations of and the justifications of law and government.

He left no stone un-turned discussing theology, ethics, politics, just war, sexual ethics including birth control and abortion and even property rights.  Although many of us today would take exception with some of his views we can all agree that his writing on the subject set the tone for what was to follow between then and July 4, 1776 over 500 years later.

This blog is not about historical political theory so we’ll skip forward almost 400 years and look at three great thinkers that shaped the modern state. First to Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) and his LEVIATHAN, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a COMMON-WEALTH Ecclesiastical and Civil Published in 1651.

Then John Locke (1632 – 1704) and his Essays on the Law of Nature (1663-64); An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1671- 90) and The Two Treatises of Government in the former, The False Principles and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer and his Followers, are Detected and Overthrown The later Is an Easy Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End, of Civil Government (1689).

Then finally to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) who is best known for his Discourse on Inequality (1755); Discourse on Political Economy (1755) and On Social Contract (1762).  The writings of these men are instrumental to the logic and basis for the writing of the Constitution of the United States.

Hobbes wrote in Leviathan his support of a constitutional monarchy and that it was the natural order to have a strong authoritarian monarchy. He proposed that man had agreed to this in a ‘social contract’ wherein man acknowledged the monarchy in return for the protection that gave him.  This view was based on the premise that without a strong government man would be no more then a lone individual living by his own wits and subject to no law or rule; therefore he could do solely as he pleased.  He called this being in the state of nature.  The following quote from Leviathan “Chapter XIII.: Of the Natural Condition of Mankind As Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery” is one of the best known passages in English philosophy; it describes the ‘natural state’ that mankind would be in, were it not for the political community.

“In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

So according to Hobbes:

In this state, people fear death, and lack the things necessary to commodious living, and the hope of being able to work to obtain them. Therefore, man accedes to a ‘social contract’ and establishes a civil society to avoid this.

Society is a population living beneath a sovereign authority, to which all individuals in that society cede some of their rights for the sake of protection. Abuses of power by this authority are to be accepted without question as the price of peace. There is no separation of powers in this view as we know them.

The sovereign must have total control over civil, military, judicial and ecclesiastical powers.

Locke writing twenty or so years after Hobbes came to a very different view developing what would be called today a liberal republicanism and a foundation for a republic.  He was probably the biggest although not the only political theorist to influence those that wrote the U.S. Constitution.

Locke takes a more optimistic view then Hobbes writing that in the state of nature man is characterized by reason and tolerance not always brute force as could be inferred from Hobbes. However he also believed in the social contract between men and their government but in a more limited sense where the government had a responsibility to the subjects and that if exceeded actually gave the subjects the right to rebel.  Locke went on to state that in a natural state all were equal and independent and they all had a right to defend themselves.  This was the basis for the words in the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, “life Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the preamble.

Locke believed in the right to private property; the accumulation of wealth (qualified); and in the principle that labor was the basis of property.  He also developed the principles of money and monetary policy and the relationship to trade.  His views on money probably had an influence on Adam Smith and his seminal work The Wealth of Nations published in 1776.

Lock also wrote that education was very important stating that, “I think I may say that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education.”  In that same line of thought Locke wrote that “the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have a very important and lasting consequences” then he argued that “associations of ideas” that one makes when young are more important than those made later because they are the foundation of the self.”

One other thing that Locke believed in was ‘religious’ freedom and equal rights.  Further Thomas Jefferson used Locke views when he wrote a bill for religious freedom in Virginia.  Locke like Hobbes believed in Natural Law which was the belief that there were moral principles that were set by nature (God) and were therefore valid every where.  Natural law is not to be confused with common law or case law which are laws which are not universal and are based on ‘local’ judicial recognition.

One of Locke’s more controversial ideas was that because of the ‘social contract’  between the people and the governing body the legislative branch of government that if those representatives went against the wishes of the people that the people had the ‘right’ to rebel against their government.  What is new about this is the right of the people to withdraw from the ‘social contract.’ However, Locke did not take this to go as far as overthrowing the monarch unless that monarch had broken is obligation to defend the country.

Rousseau is the developer of the liberal democracy principles which is a third way of looking at the ‘social contract’ and ‘natural law.’  Rousseau born in Geneva which was a Republic had a different view and took what Lock had developed and went further eliminating the monarchy at least in part.  Rousseau published his The Social Contract in 1762 fourteen years before the American Declaration of Independence. The work begins with, “Man is or was born free, and he is everywhere in chains, One man thinks himself the master or others, but remains more of a slave than they.”

Rousseau argues that the sovereignty (or the power to make laws) should be in the hands of the people. The terms he used then are different today but what he said was that the power to make laws rested in the people and the people allowed the legislators (that represented them) to make the laws.  This would be a true Representative Democracy but Rousseau stated that this system would only work in a small city state like the Geneva he grew up in.

Rousseau also wrote, “…that the general will exists to protect individuals against the mass, not to require them to be sacrificed to it.” This was a recognition that a pure democracy would not work.

Rousseau was one of the first to propose developmental education dividing the process into three stages.  The first stage is from birth to the age of about 12 when Children are guided by the emotions and impulses.  In the second stage from 12 to about 16 reason starts to develop.  Lastly from 16 onward the child develops into an adult and should also be required to learn a manual skill even if high education is pursued. He also states that at the age of 16 they are ready for a companion of the opposite sex.

An explanation of terms due to language change:

The ruler of a territory could be the Monarch the Prince or today the President

The legislative body could be an Assembly the Magistrate or a Delegate today a representative or senator

Democracy is where all eligible voters vote directly on all issues

Representative government is where the people elect a person to represent them on legislative maters

Feb 13 2014

Free Market or Central Planning?


No Justification for a Ruling Class

The justification for having or for creating a ‘ruling’ class be it secular (wealth) or an aristocracy (heredity), as it has been historically called is that this class of people are very intelligent (the best families) and well educated (only the best schools) so they should, by their very nature, be given the right to make the economic and political decisions for us.  They can do this because besides those qualifications they have the time and inclination since they come from wealthy families and have no need to work for pay like the rest of us do.  Aristotle, Socrates and Plato wrote about how to get these people the proper education and motivation so they would become good rulers; and much of political philosophy ever since has been devoted to this concept.  So we are lead to believe under these assumptions, proper education and motivation, that this group of people will do what is good for the country and the Citizens even if it is not in their best interest.  This is what is really believed, believe it or not.

That last part, in particular, is a bit much to believe as everyone always does what is in their own best interest but for now we’ll ignore that part and go to the heart of the argument which is that its their intelligence and education that make them so qualified to legislate and run the country.  Because we have the Constitution and there is technically no ruling class they, those that lust for power, are handicapped and they will try to establish themselves here by other means. Those are though legislation and regulations that will be enacted to control business to prevent those businesses from doing things that would not be good for the Citizens.  On the surface this sounds reasonable however the reality is that is will give them the control of those businesses and allow those in power to accumulate wealth as written about in Peter Schweizer’s 2013 book Extortion..

Implicit in this argument, that the government needs to protect the citizens, is the principle that the Citizens, being of lesser intelligence and not as well educated, do not know what is good for them. For example recent legislation in California that bans ‘Happy Meals’ because the parents are not smart enough to know that their kids can’t actually live only on ‘Happy Meals.’

Well let’s look at this and see if it makes any sense that a select group of people could run the country better then the Citizens could.  There are 435 Representatives in the House of Representatives and there are 100 Senators in the Senate for a total of 535 elected representatives.  Then we have the President and the Vice President and his appointed Cabinet of advisors numbering 15 for a total of 17.  Lastly we have the 9 U.S. Supreme Court justices.  Granted that these are not all elected positions but they can logically be said to be the ‘head’ of the Federal Government and the group that sets the policy of the country.  This group totals 561 people. We could add the Obama administration appointed Czars and their staff’s here if we knew who they all were, but we don’t so we’ll skip them in this analysis.

Now each in that group has a core around them let’s say a couple of dozen key staffers so 561 times 24 equals 13,464 people that are the ones running the country, could be a bit more could be a bit less but it’s a reasonable guess.  It is this group of super intelligent and well educated people that we are told should be running the country.  Today under this administration this group is comprised of mostly by progressives and they believe they will be able to make all the decisions for us and thereby we will all be better off.  For reference we will say this group of leaders has an average IQ of 150.

Now there does seem to be some logic here for we do want the best and the brightest right, but is the logic valid?

The country today, that this group of 13,464 is to manage, is in round numbers almost 320,000,000 citizens. But some of those are children and some are retired and in nursing homes so their economic activity is limited.  Let’s say that 68% of the population is economically active so that gives us ~217,000,000 citizens and they will have by definition an average IQ of 100.

Now we have the basis for the rulers and the number of subjects to be ruled. Let’s make this into a computer problem of solving an economic problem.  We can define that problem as how fast can we analyze a block of data, in this case the GDP of the country which is just under $16.0 trillion dollars (2009 dollars) today, 2013. We can then say that we need to process 16.0 trillion bits of information to give us a result.  But let’s break it down into a more reasonable number by dividing it by the number of days in a year, 365.25 days; to give us how much must be processed each day. And that would be $43.8 Billion bits of information per day that represent everything we do each day (actually the number is much greater but will use this for sake of discussion).

So now we have our problem which can be thought of as analyzing a distributed network of multiple computers and how fast can they solve a problem.

So we take our elite group of 13,464 top government officials and say they are 13,464 CPU’s running at 150 Hz (150 times a second) Then we take our 217,000,000 Citizens and say they are 217 million CPU’s running at 100 Hz (100 times a second).  The question is can the 13,464 CPU’s at 150 Hz process 43,800,000,000 bits of data faster then 217,000,000 CPU’s running at 100 Hz.  But let’s be fair and say that this elite group because of their education is faster by a factor of two.

That then gives us the government on the one end with the ability to process 43,800,000,000 data points divided by 4,039,200 (13,464 times 2 times 150 = 4,039,200) which is 10,844 seconds or 3.0 hours. Not bad!

On the other end we have the Citizens with the ability to process 43,800,000,000 data points divided by 21,700,000,000 (217,000,000 times 1 times 100 = 21,700,000,000) which is only 2.0 seconds which is 5,364 times faster and therefore is significantly better the first group.

Clearly the Citizens are significantly faster and therefore better at processing economics data.  Further the Citizens at their level are the ones directly involved in the transactions unlike the government which is removed from the actual transactions by several orders of magnitude.  That means that there are significant time delays and processing errors that can not be avoided so the government is working with “faulty” information and working on a solution to a problem that existed sometime in the “past.”  There is no way for this not to be true.

The planners find that the result of the previous plan was not what they expected so they make an adjustment in the new plan to correct, in the future, for something that was thought to have happened in the past.

To know why something didn’t happen as planed when there are hundreds of millions of transaction is not easy, actually it’s impossible.  For example lets say thin the master plan there was one place that called for 25,000 items X (they are small) to be made and shipped from location A to location B.  When the plan was implemented the truck on the way from A to B had an accident and they were all lost.  The planer sees months later that the output of B was not what was planned so he increases the quantity of X from 25,000 to 50,000 in the next cycle to make up for the loss.  This time they all get there but the plan for B still only calls for a need of 25,000 X and so they just put the difference in stock.  In engineering terms this is a positive feedback where the result of the action is that things get progressive worse.

In a free market system the market place gives both positive and negative feedback. The positive feed back increases the output and gets the planer a raise. The negative feedback allows the planer to find out what is really wrong and fix it or he loses his job when the firm closes down.

 In the United States over the past 20 years there was feedback on job loss going on in the economy as production left the country for China and India. The problem was the high cost of doing business here and it was not all labor. Washington elected officials ignored that and continued to pass laws that were not beneficial to business which resulted in positive feedback and the process accelerated.  The politicians did nothing because of all the money that was coming in to buy T-Bills which then gave them more play money to feed the Citizens that were loosing their jobs.

Back to the example, the planer keeps having A make 50,000 of X to get 25,000 of product at B until B is so full of X that they start giving away or throwing them out, absurd you say that would never happen.  Well this simple example combined with the lack of motivation of the workers in the old U.S.S.R. is exactly what led to their collapse. Further, since in collective systems all jobs are political jobs, there is no incentive to work efficiently.  Therefore there is a misallocation of resources inherent in this systems (meaning it can’t be removed) that makes these economies very un-competitive.   The only thing that kept the U.S.S.R. going as long at as it did was the motivation of a few of their motivated Citizens that worked hard because they knew it was right (to work).

It is clearly impossible for Central Planning run by a Ruling Class (which is what this is all about) to work better then a free market system with de centralized planning.  Further central planning will always make things worse not better since everything is a plan done by legislation and in most cases no one even knows what the plan is.  An actual case can be shown that some of us a bit older may remember.  In 1972 David Halberstam published a book titled The Best and The Brightest which was an account of how we got into the Vietnam War. Halberstam blamed it on the intellectuals and academics (The Best and the Brightest) in the Kennedy administration and after the assassination of Kennedy by the Johnson administration which kept them on. The book is a very interesting read and anyone who has read it would be horrified that anyone would think the government could do anything right.

de Tocqueville in his writing thought that it might be possible for an American Aristocracy or ruling class to form out of the formation of large businesses.   His thinking was that the owners of the businesses would be like the old land owners and they tenant farmers.  In this case the business owners would own the means of production instead of the land and the workers would have no place to go except to the factories to work.  Just like the tenant farmers that couldn’t leave, where were they going to go except to a different land owner?

de Tocqueville was not the only one to see this as Karl Marx certainly had this view and he wrote his Communist Manifesto only 8 years after Tocqueville finished his Volume II of Democracy in America.  It would be hard to believe that Marx’s did not read Tocqueville’s work since they were both in Paris from 1843 to 1845.

 

 

Feb 11 2014

Why do People Do What They Do?


The Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Maslow, a very famous mid twentieth century psychologist, developed a concept referred to now as Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” in 1943 in a paper he wrote A Theory of Human Motivation. Maslow’s concept was that humans would react to their environment in a particular and structured order to satisfy their internal drives or needs which he called the self-actualization theory.  He further showed this as a pyramid with things like air and water at the bottom and things like personal gratification at the top on the pyramid.

His logic is that air is required for life above all else and therefore that need must be satisfied first.  Next, we must have water and food and then an environment that’s not hostile to us.  Once these basic or core needs are met we get into more personal needs such as love and respect.  These personal or social needs always come after the physical but can become very important if we feel secure that the others have been met and are not in danger of being taken away.  There are the five levels to Maslow’s self-actualization theory.

Level 1 Physiological needs, such as hunger, thirst, and sex

Level 2 Safety needs such as security, stability, and order

Level 2 Belongingness & love needs e.g. affection, affiliation, identification

Level 4 Esteem needs, such as needs for prestige, success, self-respect

Level 5 Self-actualization needs, such as realizing potential

The first two levels of Maslow’s Hierarch of Needs go a long way to explain basic human nature.  For example the movement of Mexicans into the American southern boarder states with Mexico.  The reason being, that differences in the first two basic levels are the reasons for the occurrence of immigration.

From the forward of this book is the fact that the individual will always do what his or her best interest. The logic and theory for this was adequately proven in the book Wealth of Nations first published in 1776 by Adam Smith. And further this is supported by Level 1 & s from Maslow’s work. All attempts to disprove the theory of free markets a central feature of the theories proved by Smith have failed.  They all fail, including the works of Marx and Keynes, because all the examples that are used are not ones where there is a real “free” market.

The second fact, also discussed in the forward to this book is that after many centuries of trying just about every conceivable kind of political or governmental system imaginable we find that there are really only two basic kinds.  The book The Five Thousand Year Leap written by Cleon Skousen gives an excellent explanation on the reasons for this.

The first based on the rule of a single party usually through the leadership of a strongman.  This person could be a King or a President for life and has immense personal power but still must have the support of a group of close confidants that carry out this dictates.  Historically this form of government appears to be the most “common” form of government that has every existed. In this form of government the people exist, only, to support the government, they are subjects.  This form develops from either an attempt at Democracy or form anarchy after the collapse of a government which was until the formation of the United States with its Constitution the only other possibilities there were.

Today the only other form of government that is possible is something new and it is a system based on a set of laws and principles that form the basis for the legitimacy of the government, a fixed constitution.  The U.S. Constitution is the best example of this form being the one that has lasted the longest, so far, since it was designed to be very hard to change. In this system the federal government is there solely at the will of the people and is there solely to protect the people not to rule them. However, there is a great risk here for if this system does not have very strong, not just adequate, checks and balances the politicians will over time turn this system into the government of a strongman, backed by a ruling party.

Why these previous paragraphs are so important is that the principles identified can totally explain the reason for the movement of people from one place to another, be it from one side of town to the other or from one country to another. The movement occurs because of either economic or political restrictions or both on the individual where he or she is and that the individual see’s that he or she can live better someplace else.

If there are no restrictions on movement then the movement will be quick and if there are restrictions the movement will be slowed.  But in either case unless there are significant and insurmountable physical barriers be they natural or man made the movement will not be stopped.

Being a person with a strong technical background it would be logical to be able to put this into a set of principles much like those that are used in science and engineering.  In this case we will use the form used for the explanation of the laws of thermodynamics (which is about the movement of energy – heat).  There are three laws of thermodynamics which we will not go into this is not about engineering. The engineering form (Three principles or laws) used to explain thermodynamics by scientists and Engineers does seem to fit well when also trying to explain the motivation behind the movement of people so that is why it was used here.

The First Law of Motivation can then be stated that the principle factors determining the core of human behavior are predominantly genetically fixed. This is adequately explained in Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of needs so further discussion here is not needed.  Therefore it can be stated that we are dealing with basic principles of motivation that apply to all humans.

The Second Law of Motivation can then be stated as individuals will move to the place that satisfies the greatest number of their needs in the order explained by Maslow.  Or stated a different way we can say that individuals will always move to a place that allows them to move up Maslow’s pyramid. That flow will be from the least to the most and will be inversely proportional to the strength of the resistance to that flow be that resistance natural or man made.

The Third Law of Motivation is that if there is no individual freedom and there is no opportunity where the person is and there is therefore no way to move then there is no motivation to work or be productive as there is no personal advantage.  This will create a stagnant society where people will only do the bare bones necessities to survive and no more.  Further it will take prodding by the government to get even that done.

The Second Law of Motivation explains why there is and has always been a movement of people into the United States.

The Third Law of Motivation explains why the old U.S.S.R. collapsed when its work force could no longer be coerced into being productive citizens.

The Second Law of Motivation explains why U.S. Citizens almost never move out of the country even when that are extolling the virtues of other political systems.

The Third Law of Motivation explains why in a welfare state there is no incentive for those at the bottom to move out.  All their first level needs are taken care of by the state.

The issue that we face now with immigration legal or illegal is one where the standard of living in the United Sates combined with the higher level of personal freedom that we have makes for a powerful magnet to those not so fortunate.  This is especially true at the border between Mexico and the United States where the disparity is large.  The only thing that has prevented a title wave of Mexicans to enter the country is the desolate land that must be crossed over much of the southern border.  Even still and despite the dangers a high percentage of the hundreds of thousands that start the journey eventually make it across.

The U.S. Mexico border could have been sealed long ago if the government had wanted to.  Would it have been expensive, of course it would have.  That isn’t the question the question is why it wasn’t done.  Three reasons prevent a barrier from ever being built.

One the Democrat Party sees the Mexicans as a source of future votes since they will vote at some time in the future in a higher percentage to them then to republicans’ because of entitlements. 

Two the Republican Party sees the Mexicans as a source of cheep labor and that they could be used as leverage to hold down labor costs for companies. 

Three both saw them (the documented and undocumented) as a cheep source of personal servants to do their menial work and take care of their children. How many politicians have been caught not paying taxes for having au pairs, nannies and other domestic help?

Under President Ronald Reagan an attempt at solving the problem was tried with amnesty and a promise of better broader security. The border security never happened and without securing the border the flow is never going to stop as the Second Law of Motivation explains.  The lure of moving up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was too strong since they, the Mexicans, were on the bottom in Mexico and there was no way they could move down any further, they were already on the bottom, and they also didn’t believe they had any chance to move up where they were.

To stop the flow is not possible but there are two ways to significantly slow it down. One is with a very solid and formidable barrier that makes it very difficult to make it across.  In addition we would need cleared zones, on the U.S. side, that are off limits to everyone so that anyone in them can be detained.  This would require relocating Americans and a significant military presence.  Something like the barrier between the east and west in Europe after WW II is what would be need, only keeping people out not in.  We also know that, that was not 100% effective.

The other method would be to change the differential in the standard of living between Mexico and the U.S. Raising that of Mexico reduces the incentive just as lowering that of the U.S. does. Lowering the U.S. standard is the more practical since raising the standard in Mexico is not what the politicians there want. Either or both minimizes the flow in accordance with the Second Law of Motivation.

If we don’t build a barrier or if we don’t lower our standard of living to be more in line with the rest of the world then we are faced with the problem of having created a very unfair system of immigration.  The reason for this is not enough Mexicans (we’ll use that term for all of Central America) are allowed in nor could there be as we would need to allow many millions in to stop the illegal flow.  And Mexico is not interested in helping with the problem as the flow of people north is a pressure relief on them politically. And besides with the growing Mexican influence Mexico City has a growing influence on policies being established in Washington.

Feb 10 2014

Universal Suffrage


Good or Bad?

Suffrage is the term given for the right to cast a vote.  In a pure Democracy everyone of the established voting age or any other qualifier can cast a ballot.  Then all it takes is for one side to have one vote more then the other side in order to win, which is majority rule.  In addition in a pure democracy all the citizens with the right to vote would vote on all issues directly.  Rousseau wrote about that kind of Democracy in his The Social Contract since he was very familiar with this kind of government from Geneva where he grew up.  Obviously this system only applies to a small area or town.

That direct voting by the citizens on everything has always been considered to be both bad and impossible especially at the Federal level and so when the Constitution was written only men (predominately white) with property were allowed to vote. But that restrictive view was not universal and so a few years later under President Jackson, who believed that voting rights should be extended, they were. Therefore by 1840 universal white male suffrage (and some blacks) was the norm, and nearly all requirements to own property had been dropped.

This expansion of the voting franchise continued unabated until 1971 when by that time all Citizens over 18 male or female and of any race could vote.  Whether that was good or not it was the law of the land through the amendment process to the Constitution (14th, 15th, 19th, 23rd, 24th and 26th Amendments plus various legislative acts).  The United States was the first major country to have full suffrage for women starting with a few states as early as 1869 and completed when the 19th amendment was ratified in 1920.

The problem with this expansion of the franchise was not with any of the various groups that were added but with an ever increasing lack of understanding by the voters on whom or what they were voting for. There were two parts to this:

The first problem was the education system which stopped teaching the principles of government.  This was by far the worst problem for if the Citizens no longer understood their system of government then they could be manipulated by those seeking power.

The second problem was the formation of political parties that took advantage of this and created block voting where it didn’t matter who was running or what the issue was — it was a vote cast only for the party.

With the very lose voter registration process and vote manipulation (this maters a lot when the vote is close) going on today we have created a system where the winner is chosen more by popularity and money then anything that really counts. Who has the best “spin” and/or the most money gets to win today with the TV, radio and the web (social media) as powerful means of communication. An interesting tidbit about the entertainment industry, Plato in his Republic understood that the Arts could influence elections and that therefore they must be strictly controlled so as not to corrupt the Citizens, he would be appalled at what comes out of Hollywood today..

But there is more as we have a representative system of government as the Citizens with the right to vote do not vote directly they vote for Representatives. In the Federal system as originally setup the Citizens voted for someone to represent them in the House of Representatives known as the Peoples house, for obvious reasons.   The House with the Constitutional mandate to prepare an operating budget for the Federal government was given this task so that the Citizens could control the spending since it was their representatives that were responsible for the budget.

This was a much debated system with concerns that the Citizens would find ways to have the federal government find ways to spend money on them, the citizens.  So to counter this tendency the Senate was established (for other reasons as well) and they had to concur with the House on spending bills.

Now the Senate was originally set up to be filled with appointed Senators two from each state.  The logic being that the several states would appoint seasoned and experienced Citizens to these positions.  It was probably assumed back then that these would be wealthy land owners and they would represent the upper class of the country while the House was for the common man.  A check and balance system again.

So with this system both ends of the Citizens were represented the common man and the wealthy man. And they had to work together to get anything done.

But over the last couple of elections cycles this system has been subverted by the Democratic Progressives and the current occupant of the White House Barak Husain Obama the first president that actually instructs the Senate to refuse to bring up House passed Budgets. So instead of doing their job they demand that their spending ideas be taken and no debate is allowed.  The president approves of this process since he does nothing to stop it and instead demands that the House Republicans give him what he wants. This is probably unconstitutional but since the Public education system has produced several generations of students with no real understanding of the process and so the media can blame the House for not giving Obama what he wants. Which is absurd since the House is the peoples House and it is their main responsibility not the Senate nor the Presidents to produce a Federal Budget.

James Madison, “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity…to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”