Crimethink: The Collectivist War on Ideas

"To even consider any thought not in line with the principles of Ingsoc. Doubting any of the principles of Ingsoc. All crimes begin with a thought. So, if you control thought, you can control crime. "Thoughtcrime is death. Thoughtcrime does not entail death, Thoughtcrime is death. The essential crime that contains all others in itself."

-- Newspeak Dictionary: Definitions from Orwell's 1984

"Threat reports that focus on ideology instead of

criminal activity are threatening to civil liberties . . ."

-Michael German, ACLU Analyst, writing about the MIAC Report

I have been thinking quite a bit about politically correct language and the style of argumentation that is coming from the statists lately. In fact, I have been thinking about it since last fall, when I first ventured an unpopular opinion at that rumored bastion of free throught, the university. However, in the past several months, my thoughts have become focused on two issues, the redefinition of certain ideas as extremist and therefore outside ordinary discourse, and the inability of collectivists to construct or recognize an argument from principle. I think these two issues are likely related.

The redefinition of ideas (rather than actions) as extremist is really an extension of the redefinition of certain words and ideas as politically incorrect. Labelling some speech as politically incorrect narrows the terms of discourse and limits the ability of individuals to discuss any and all ideas. When judicial sanctions and legal punishments are imposed upon individuals who persist in discussing such ideas then the Western concepts of free thought and free expression are violated. However, social sanctions are also limiting, and it is through this nudge effect that certain ideas are expunged from discourse.

The imposition of politically correct discourse upon Western culture in modern times came from the Frankfort School, a Marxist think tank founded in Europe for the purpose of spreading a social correlate of Marxist economics. The Frankfort School thus established what they called "critical theory" which is critical, but it is not a theory. It is simply a method to bring down Western culture by criticizing it in all its aspects, without suggesting an alternative to any of its institutions and/or ideas. The Frankfort School moved to Columbia University in New York during WWII, and brought the concept of political correctness with it. This Social Marxism was spread first in academia and then throughout the culture courtesy the Consciousness Revolution of the 1960's.

What is so insidious about political correctness is that it supresses the free expression of ideas that do not conform to those approved by a self-appointed cultural elite. These people have placed themselves into the position of deciding what ideas may be discussed and which ones may not. For the past decades, they have relied on self-censorship and social nudging to enforce their particular ideological orthodoxy. More recently, through the use of academic judicial processes and by laws against hate speech and hate crimes, they have sought to impose such censorship from above. As Willian Lind put in an AIA address in 2000:

"America today is in the throws of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In "hate crimes" we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it." (The Origins of Political Correctness: An Accuracy in Academia Address).

There are two particularly troubling aspects of this supression of ideas.

One is that, as free Americans find their voices and try to use reason to support our founding ideas, they find that more and more concepts are being subsumed under politically correct labels. Thus recently, a popular talk-show host was accused of a "smear campaign" for correctly labeling former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones as a Marxist, even though Jones used that label for himself. Apparently, labels for ideas such as socialism, fascism, and Marxism, are now themselves politically incorrect and may not be spoken. At least, not by us.

If an idea may not be spoken, it first becomes unspeakable and then becomes unthinkable.

Having no way to name the concept, opponents to an idea become inarticulate. The battle is lost to the politically correct mavens before it is begun; It is lost, not to superior arguments, but to the refusal to name the insidious nature of political correctness. This is why it is so important for those of us who oppose such censorship to define our terms and argue our position from principle, and to do so as consistently, rationally and firmly as possible. We must refuse to self-censor. We must name the ideological origins of politically correct censorship and name the motives of those who wish to silence us.

The second problematic aspect of political correctness is that its proponents group together a set of positions that do not logically rely on one another, thus linking them into a series by which they can shift the discussion. For example, if I were to argue that parents have the right to educational choices for their children, (as I have) a proponent of PC would (and has) immediately launched into a diatribe of name-calling, accusing me of being a creationist (which I am not). If I defend myself against such an objection, I have conceded to political correctness, and if I do not defend myself, I am conceding to an untruth. Instead of being caught in this false dilemna, I must recognize that in shifting the discussion, the PC czar has conceded that he has no argument; the whole thing has devolved into name-calling. At that point, the discussion is essentially over. All that remains is for me to name what has happened. Calmly and clearly. There is no way to "win" such a dilemna, but by bringing the reality into the light of day, I can inform reasonable listeners about what is really going on.

As for the opponent, usually when he finds he has no argument, he gets mad:

For example, consider the following diatribe by a supporter of statism from a Facebook page. This person had been challenged several times to answer a direct question after calling a Native American from Utah who opposes certain Obama policies a racist, even though the policies he oppose have nothing to do with race. Backed into a corner, he responded:

"Apparently you psycho GOP sheep would be more comfortable if obama told our kids, "Ignore evolution, intelligent design (RELIGION) is the only truth. Join the army someday, hopefully you won't be sent to a foreign land to die based on bad intelligence (LIES). And don't forget to abstain from sex, but if you can't, whatever you do, don't wear a condom."There was no partisanship in the speech. Eat your (expletive deleted) words and admit that you made up your minds about the speech before the speech even happened. Why? Because you don't want to share this country anyone who isn't like you. What other reason is there to still be a republican? GW Bush was the worst president in the history of the united states. Where was your outrage then? Small thinking out of small towns, people living in small bubbles. When election time rolls around the GOP will pander to your beliefs, to get your vote and rob you (expletive deleted) blind when they are in power. And with a black president, the GOP are starting to lose their (expletive deleted) minds. Back to the good ole days, right? When bush and his corrupt scum of a white house spent every day trying to (explitive deleted) the middle class out of every dime and commit war crimes. (Expletive deleted) who created this bullshit nutjob KKK group and (expletive deleted) all you parents who are actually scared of this president. Most of you wouldn't even know how to identify socialism even if it was anywhere near what the president said. Which it wasn't. Psychos." (Name expunged to protect the guilty).

Notice that there are no arguments in this piece of very poor writing. It is a string of undemonstrated assertions, repetitive lies, and name calling, originally complete with the repeated use of a certain strong Anglo-Saxon word beginning with F. (Although this is the worst I've seen, almost every non-argument I've encountered is there). What this writer wants is for his interlocutors to argue each claim.

But there are no arguments here at all, and nothing worthy of response.

He is not even wrong.*

*A friend showed . . . [physicist Wolfgang Pauli]the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli's views. Pauli remarked sadly, 'That's not right. It's not even wrong.' " Peierls, 1960).

This is the reality of it: those who impose PC have no arguments. If they did, they would not have to attempt politically correct censorship. This is why they use propaganda techniques, such as subject-shifting, name-calling and the big lie, rather than engaging in principled discussion. Ultimately, they believe they are right, not from rational thought, but by some magical superiority. This is why they cannot construct an argument. Their sense of rightness comes not from reason, but from emotion. They feel it, so therefore it must be true. This is, as I have pointed out many times in this blog, the vision of the annointed. Until such a person chooses to think rationally about his claims, there is no point in continuing the discussion.

R3volution: Don't Mess with ABQ Patriots

Yesterday I posted an entry about the continuing bad reporting and derogatory names directed at the ABQ Tea Party. Thanks to my friend Corky, and another blogger named Joe, screen shots and pdf files of the original story at KRQE News went out to patriot groups all across the country. The original headline was subsequently changed.

This morning, an anonymous commentor reported that KRQE had removed all of the comments from the webpage that housed the story. When I went to that page to verify this information, I found that the entire story had been removed. This was KRQE's second mistake.

The arrogance of the media is without bounds. When confronted with their first mistake by numerous commentors, KRQE management should have publically apologized to the Albuquerque Tea Party, the Tea Party Express and to the citizens who attended the rally for calling them all a sexually charged derogatory name. But instead of doing so, and instread of firing or at least disciplining the reporter who thought that using that kind of language was cute, KRQE opted to try to pretend that such an insult never happened. That's like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. Oops!

Given this further arrogance, it is likely that the local patriots will continue to turn the dial away from channel 13 and inform the station's sponsors about why they are doing so. This is not some boycott engineered from some national organization. Local, hard-working individuals in what is derisively called "flyover country" by the national media are simply tired of having their intelligence and hard-work continually insulted. Personally, I see my boycott of KRQE as similar to my boycott of the Olympics last summer. I am not organizing a boycott. I am simply tired of being put down by arrogant reporters who have far less education and life experience than I. I refuse to support such businesses further.

KRQE ought to put these so-called reporters through a refresher course on the difference between reporting a story and editorializing. Further, some business education might benefit both the employees and adminstrators of the station. Normally, businesses do not go out their way to bite the hand that feeds them!
Twice.

Finally, KRQE's craven removal of the story has told us one thing. They know that we know what they are about.

It's a start.

KRQE: We are paying attention and we will act.

Don't mess with Albuquerque Patriots!

The Pursuit of Religious Happiness

Some blog posts that I write get many comments right away.
Some never get any comments at all.
And then there are those that get belated comments. Such it has been with my post from last July, Declaration! The Pursuit of Happiness.

This blog entry received three separate comments from one Miriam, who seems to want to convert me to Christianity. Sorry, Miriam, but my heart belongs to Torah.
Being one of the token Jews of the Homeschool Blogosphere has its little ironies. During Hannukah, I received a gift and an earnest letter from a Mormon reader of my blog, who wants to convert me to Mormonism. Very kindly meant, I am sure, but this is also not a likely prospect. As Rabbi Joe Black said at the Boychick's Bar Mitzvah, " . . . for 4,000 years our people have lived by [Torah] and too often, they have died for it." I, as an American, have the Constitutionally guaranteed right to be free of religious coercion, and frankly, I am glad I do not have to die for Torah. I would so much rather live by it. I like being Jewish. It is part of my personal pursuit of happiness.

But I digress. The real meat of Miriam's argument was that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and that this religious expression was intended to be Protestant Christianity. Now, I cannot argue that the founders were not Christian. They were. But what I can and do argue, quite passionately, is that many of them were also aware of the dire nature of the Christian brutality against other Christians that ocurred in Europe, and that they were not eager to replicate it here. Consider, as just one of many examples, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. (Son of Liberty Paul Revere was the descendent of a survivor of that terrible event).

More to the point, the founders were also steeped in the Enlightenment philosophy that came from England and Scotland, which emphasized the rights of man, and also took a rather dour view of the human capacity for self-righteous violence. The Glorious Revolution in England had come on the heels of the English Civil Wars, which were as nasty a religious conflict as had been the murdering of religious dissidents by Bloody Mary. These Enlightenment values with respect to the freedom of the human mind and conscience were expressed by Thomas Jefferson thusly:

"Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to exalt it by its influence on reason alone; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time . . ." --Thomas Jefferson, Preamble to the Virginia Declaration of Religious Freedom, 1785 (Emphasis added).

We can see from the emphasized portions the Enlightenment influence on Jefferson's thought: that the Creator has made the mind to be free, and that no coercion can effect holiness, and that reason is the ultimate guide of the human conscience. The influence of the experience of religious coercion in Europe can be seen from Jefferson's comments about the uninspired and fallible nature of the men who would coerce the faith of others.

And of course, there were great differences among the colonies themselves with respect to religion. There was Puritan New England, Quaker Pennsylvania, the small "c" catholics (Church of England and Church of Scotland) of Virginia and the Carolinas, the Dutch Protestants of New York, and the Roman Catholics of Maryland. Some of the Colonies had established religions, but others, such as Rhode Island, were established on the principle of the right to freedom from religious coercion.

All of these realities undoubtedly influenced the non-establishment clause of Amendment I of the United States Constitution. But the overall Enlightenment philosophy of the Rights of Man is the overarching justification for the rights asserted in the Declaration of Independence and ennumerated in the Bill of Rights. These rights are individual rights based on the nature of the human being who requires Liberty in order to live. This is what is meant by "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. . ." These Enlightenment values are further revealed in Jefferson's writing:

" . . .that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right;

"that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty . . ." Ibid.

The establishment of a Constitutional guarrantee of individual rights for the first time in human history recognized individual human beings to be free and independent masters of their own lives, and subject only to their own conscience with respect to religious opinion and belief. This is what is so revolutionary about the American Republic. We do not owe our allegiance to Kings or Princes, nor Popes or Bishops, but to the Constitution and the Republic that it created. The government exists to protect our rights, we do not exist to serve the government.

What is most interesting to me about Miriam's argument, and indeed the arguments of most dominionist Christians, when they insist that this is a Christian nation, is that they always assert some collective right of "society" to govern what they consider to be the sinful behavior of fellow citizens. Thus Miriam argues:

" . . .Take for example homosexuality, where I personally believe that this behavior does in fact violate the rights of others (especially when viewing its effects on society as a whole), many people in today’s culture would disagree vehemently, claiming the behavior is harmless to others." (Comment on Declaration! The Pursuit of Happiness, linked above).

This argument is premised on the idea that society as a whole has certain rights that supercede the rights of the individual. What rights those are she left unstated, because, in fact society is not an entity in itself, and has no rights. All rights are held by individuals.
Miriam, as an individual, has every right to snub homosexuals, refuse them entry to her church, hate them in her heart, and refuse to socialize with them. The values by which she enacts such behaviors are between her and her own sovereign conscience. But Miriam has no right to initiate force against them in the name of any god or government. She and her coreligionists may not deprive them of their lives, liberty, or property.

Part of Miriam's confusion about the individual nature of rights may come from the recent movement to assign rights to groups: gay rights, women's rights, animal rights, and so on. Miriam would be correct if she stated that such attribution of group rights violates her own individual rights. For example, gays have no right to get the government to force a photographer to take pictures of a gay wedding (to cite one notorious New Mexican violation of the Constitution) by threatening to remove her business license. That would be a violation of both her liberty and property. But gays do have every right to snub her, refuse her entry into their churches, and hate her in their hearts. They also have the sovereign right of conscience.

Finally, I also disagree with Miriam's assertion that the rights declared in the Declaration of Independence are based on what she calls "Judeo-Christian" values. Perhaps, because I am a Jew, I am far more aware of differences between the universalistic values of Christianity and the more particularistic Jewish legal tradition. For example, Judaism does not assert any obligation of non-Jews to obey Halachah (Jewish law). Christianity, with its doctrine of universal salvation, on the other hand, requires all human beings to recognize the deity status of Jesus or be consigned to death and hell. Jewish moral values only require right action, whereas in Christianity, there is a great emphasis on right belief. Judaism does not claim moral dominion over all human beings. Christianity's adherents often claim that they invented morality.

Both Judaism and Christianity subscribe to certain more universal human moral standards (you shall not steal, you shall not murder). These universal moral standards are also the basis for the concept of the Rights of Man, which were developed in Western culture. And although both Judaism and Christianity have greatly influence Western ideas, the set of Western values itself, including the concept of natural rights, is not purely derived from religious thought. And these values predate fundmentalist Christianity by more than 20 centuries.

The United States has NO established religion. As the first amendment states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Enough said!

The Narrowing of Normal

"No one believes anymore that scientists are

trained in science classses or politicians in

civics classes or poets in English classes.

The truth is that schools really don't teach

anything except how to obey orders."

--John Taylor Gatto, "The Curriculum

of the Family" in A Different
Kind of

Teacher, 2001.

A few weeks ago I read about a mother who had her son arrested for smoking pot. I first saw the story via a homeschooling blog, though I don't remember where. (Update: It is at The Thinking Mother here). The blogger seemed troubled by the story, although she could not put her finger on why. My visceral response vis-a-vis my kids and legal athority is to keep the two as far apart as possible. There is ample evidence that the systems euphemistically designed to "help" children in various ways also function to introduce a good deal of conformity among them. And those who refuse to conform are criminalized.

But the story got me thinking again about what I call the "narrowing of normal". It is a pervasive mind-set in our current culture; a mind-set that limits what is considered normal to a very narrow set of behaviors and choices, and criminalizes and/or makes diseases of any behavior outside those rapidly narrowing bounds.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there were odd people in my world. Most of them could be characterized as "mostly harmless", like the earth itself according to The Hitcher's Guide to the Galaxy. We had words for them, words like 'eccentric" and "strange." Now we have other words for them, words that come from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In the past, people who just wanted to be left alone were called hermits, but now they are thought to have a disease, one that could be "a danger to society" and must be "treated" for the good of society, and, of course, "for their own good". In the 1950's, unconformity was socially nudged, but now it is legally punished in a variety of ways.

Although adults can get away with being non-conformist to a limited degree, heaven help the child who does not conform to the increasingly narrow norm. I was talking to a former social worker over last winter's holiday, and she was explaining to me why she left the field. She told of terrible stories in which children were made responsible for family dysfunction, labeled and removed from their homes. Often those children ended up with a psychiatric diagnosis and were forced into treatment. Most of the time, this friend explained, they also ended up with legal record as well. A record that, like the one the young man whose mother reported him to the police for smoking pot will have, will bind that child for life, taking certain adult choices out of their reach. Choices like college or a career in politics or medicine.

I have seen the same in schools. Children who respond in any way except passive docility to the officious busy-body interference of school personnel are quickly labeled as oppositional, as defiant, as unable to learn. Screening instruments that cast a wide net of disorder around normally foolish and childlike behaviors are used to label children "in need of assistance" or "at-risk for school failure." A child who retains pride in her not-PC ethnicity, or who defends himself against a bully who comes from the protected ethnic group is likely to be labeled and made the problem.

Temple Grandin calls these potentially labeled behaviors as ones that break the "stupid neurotypical rules." But in the same breath, she warns parents and teachers that it must be impressed upon the child that not conforming with certain such rules could limit their options severely in the future, and even cost them them their freedom from officialdom in the near and far-off future.

Did I say that adults can be less conforming? Lately, at least in Albuquerque, this is only true if they stay away from the police. An elderly couple were arrested and roughed up last summer because they did not response docilely to a complaint that they had left a dog in the car. (It turns out the man had gone to get them all some water). The 90 year old husband ended up in cardiac care and the 87 year old wife was pushed around because she was supposedly trying to escape, even though, with a prosthetic leg and a walker, she wasn't likely to run anywhere faster than the cop. Recently, a young adult with a learning disability spent time in jail for DWI because his speech was slurred, even though his blood alcohol content was 0.00% (that's zero, precise to the hundreth of a percent). His crime? A speech impediment.

And don't get me started on "the war on drugs." Suffice it to say that to put young users caught with a small amount of pot in jail with hardened criminals is not terribly productive. And it is less so, if that person becomes a non-person in society, unable to go to college or work in certain fields, merely for having been arrested for such a "crime."

And then there is the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. The committee making it up is considering diagnoses that would make excess internet use (what is excess?), political apathy (sounds Soviet, nu?), and "parental alienation*" into psychiatric diseases. Being overweight is also being considered as some kind of mental disorder, as well as a socially stigmatized difference.

*I don't know if the parents are alienated or if the children are.

The formerly broad category of "normal", which was once so wide that one could argue about what it really meant, is being narrowed to a frightening degree. And those found outside the bounds are likely to become the targets of special government programs aimed at getting them to conform. Because to those who what's best for us, being different just has to be an impediment to happiness.

I believe this progressive narrowing of normal has two purposes and neither of them are good. The first is to impose fairness upon an unfair world by those who mistake equality for equity. Among such people, individual differences are an affront to their Vision of the Annointed. In the perfect collectivized world, everyone must be made equal. (For a great dystopian short story about this, see Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. A trailer for the movie 2081, based on this story can be seen here).

The other is about control. People who deviate from a very narrow norm can be used to illustrate the consequences of dissent and difference quite effectively, whether those consequences are labled as a mental illness to be medicated or as a crime to be punished. Thus a whole society can be enslaved to an unlivable moral code, their liberty taken from them by masters who have something to gain.

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? . . . We want them broken. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law abiding citizens? . . . But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted--and you create a nation of law-breakers--and then you cash in on guilt." (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Centennial Edition, p. 436, emphasis in the original).

The narrowing of normal, whether conscious or not, is a way to limit the freedom of others to be who they are. It destroys their liberty and their ability to freely pursue their own happiness, and often, too often, it destroys lives.

TANSTAAFL: The Sum of the Laws of Thermodynamics

"If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
--Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1915)

The Magicians won in Congress yesterday.
It was expected, because I believe that the set called Pols is overwhelmingly populated by people who live in unreality so massive that it is rapidly approaching maximum entropy.
They do not accept the laws of thermodynamics, especially the second law, and therefore they believe that there is such a thing as a free lunch.
Would that they would collapse in utter humiliation. Instead, as we live in dangerous times, I fear it is the economy of this country and all that it has built that will do the collapsing. Unfortunately.

For the benefit of our scientifically illiterate Congress, I present the laws of thermodynamics translated into a form that even a Pol can undertand --if and only if he doesn't try to think and chew gum at the same time.

A most basic law zero has been stated:
0. When two objects or systems A and B are in equilibrium with each other, the energy that flows from A to B will be the same as the energy that flows from B to A.
Translation: There is a game.

Now on to the original three.

1. The Law of Conservation of Energy: Energy out cannot exceed energy in. You cannot get more than 100% efficiency.
Translation: You can't win the game. (You can't get something for nothing).

2. The Law of Entropy*: Any process in a closed system will increase the entropy of said closed system. Any process in an open system will increase the entropy of the universe. The entropy of the universe can never decrease. Loophole: You can have 100% efficiency only at a temperature of absolute zero, meaning you can't get 100% efficiency.
Translation: You can't break even.

*Entropy (S) can be defined as the tendency of a system towards disorder. The second law thus says that a closed system will accumulate disorder, and that an open system can become ordered only at the expense of the universe. Thus, as a bumper sticker I got when I passed P-Chem states, "S happens."

3. The Law of Absolute Zero*: It is impossible to reach the temperature of absolute zero. Thus the loophole above is not real.
Translation: You can't even quit the game.

*Absolute Zero is the temperature at which there is minimal molecular energy so that energy cannot be transferred among systems. Absolute zero, defined as -273.15 degrees C, cannot be achieved artificially or naturally (the third law).

All three laws can be summed up as: TANSTAAFL! There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

And I end with another quote:

"Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.
--Seth Lloyd, Nature 430 (2004) p. 971

The Energy Web

I have been reading a lot of science fiction and survival novels this summer. I re-read Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon! and George R. Stewart's classic, Earth Abides. I re-read the first book of S.M. Stirling Emberverse series, Dies the Fire. On Tuesday, I was browsing in the bookstore, looking for a new thriller for which I had read a review, when I came across a new "end of the world" story by William S. Forstchen called One Second After. About the aftermath of an EMP attack on the North American continent, I could barely put it down. So now I am reading that along with the more hopeful novel of a libertarian revolution, Heinlein's immortal The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

I am re-reading and reading these kinds of books, because I have been thinking about the complex web of interactions that makes up a civilization. My original scientific training was in ecology and evolution, such scientists do a lot of thinking about how energy moves through ecosystems via species interactions (such as predation) from the photosynthetic primary producers on to the primary consumers, secondary and tertiary consumers, and how it fans out to the scavengers at the edges. We call this the "food web" but it is really about the movement of energy, gathered by plants from the photons of the sun, and stored in carbon bonds, that are broken by combustion in a process called cellular respiration, which is the process of breaking those bonds in order to move the energy into more easily spendable ATP molecules, which are the energy currency of living cells.

Thus I was excited but not surprised when reading the Forstchen book to come across this passage:

"The web of our society . . . was like the beautiful spider webs he'd find as a boy in the back lot after dawn on summer days, dew making them visible. Vast, intricate things. And at the single touch of a match, the web just collapsed and all that was left for the spider to do , if it survived that day, was to rebuild the web entirely from scratch." (One Second After, p. 260).

Our whole advanced civilization is built of the gossamer webbing of energy interactions, fueled by the ancient photon energy stored in the carbon bonds of fossil fuels. We have not yet found an alternative source of energy that is as efficient a supply of power by which to run our complex web of interactions, except nuclear energy, which we have made prohibitively expensive and difficult to deploy through regulation.

Today, Congress is voting, and may well make those fossil fuels by which we run our civilization prohibitively expensive by a tax system they call cap-and-trade. We currently have no quickly deployable alternative that is ready and able to run a complex, industrial society.

For example, think about medicines, as the protagonist does in One Second After:

"The medicines. Yes, they were out there, someplace. . . . but the factories that made them were in the cities, and the cities had no power, and the people who worked in the factories were hunkered down or scattered refugees . . . And even if the factories did suddenly turn on, the [medicine] was processed from genetically altered bacteria in labs . . . a thousand miles away. The bottles it was then loaded into? Perhaps made in Mexico and trucked to the lab a thousand miles away and then loaded back aboard climate controlled trucks, and taken to airports and priority shipped in containers specially designed, those containers perhaps made in Mississippi. And so it went." (One Second After, p. 259).

And so it goes. For every single thing we ordinarily depend upon to make our lives possible in such numbers. Do you know where your water comes from? For most of us, pumps that require power are used somewhere in the process of getting it from the source to our homes and factories and places of business.

What about food? It takes energy to produce food in the abundance necessary for an American farmer to feed his family, and 20 additional people somewhere in the world. Energy is required to run the tractors for planting and harvest, and to produce the insecticides and herbicides and fertilizers necessary to have transformed farming from a subsistence operation to one that can feed the world. It takes more energy to process the food, to make it safe for human consumption, and to transport it to our cities and towns.

And so it goes for every single thing we use to make our living on this planet.
Living is not free. Not for the birds of the air, not for the bees in honey, and not even for the lilies of the field, that do indeed 'toil and spin' using that photon energy captured from the sun to make glucose which they then use up in the business of living.

The difference between them and us is this. In the natural food web, the efficiency between each node averages out at about 10%. This means that when a plant captures the energy from the photon into the carbon bonds in glucose, 90% of the energy is lost. And the same thing happens when the grazer then eats the plant. And again when the predator eats the grazer, and so forth across the food web.

However, by the design and use of technology that converts fossil fuels into energy-- technology being the human ecological niche--we are now able to get average efficiencies of 30 - 40%, which means that we can support a much more intricate web than we were able to as hunters and gatherers.

Sometimes I think that our leaders are like lemmings, inexplicably leading us to to a very real and very deadly collapse of technology for reasons that they (and we) do not understand and cannot fathom. The cap-and-tax scheme will reduce the efficiency by which we transfer energy for living throughout our civilization. And the costs, defined in dollars, will be shouldered by all of us, from Nancy Pelosi in her private jet, to the day-laborer driving that 1970's era clunker to the job site.

We will pay more for food, for transportation, for heat and light, for life-saving medicines and for life-giving water. And this economic suicide, like all economic disasters, will hit the working poor first, and hit them harder. Just as the English working mother of the industrial revolution had reason to bless James Watt for the power that provided her with clean cotton underwear every day, so will the American working mother have reason to curse Congress for taking that power out of her reach, condemning her and her children to lower standards of sanitation, nutrition and comfort. She will be forced to choose between heat, light, food, and/or medicine.

Our amazing energy web, delicate and beautiful, can be collapsed very quickly by the irrational actions of Congress. Nature's learning curve is far more steep.. It is human beings who will suffer.

These people in Congress are not benevolent. They live for a momentary gain, and do not consider the future of tax slavery and misery to which they condemn their own posterity. They are like lemmings running blindly over a cliff.

And it will not matter one iota in the vast reaches of planetary time. The climate cycles of the planet will continue to wax and wane in great temporal cycles. Species will come, and species will go. Earth abides.

The Wrong Side of a Do-Gooding Law

It is interesting to see what strange bedfellows the current rush of the federal government toward fascism* is creating. Yes, fascism. I am tired of self-censoring, and I think it's about time to call a spade an F'ing shovel.

*Fascism is here defined as the control of capital and those who manage it by the government, through the use of central planning, although the actual companies remain nominally in private hands.

In the past few weeks, I have been thinking about how those of us who oppose any part of President Obama's* monster government have been cast. I have seen it in the comments to this blog. The progressive bloggers and the lefties have consistently labeled concerned citizens as partisan, and have cast all arguments into the major party straightjackets. Obama's minions are every bit as eager to use the "if you're not for us, you're against us" cannard as were G.W.'s hacks.

*Yes, I am aware that Obama "inherited" Mr. Bush's monster government and trashed economy, but Obama has set out to grow government even bigger much faster, and he is trashing the dollar at an even more alarming rate. This is now his government, and two branches are controlled by one party. They cannot excuse their behavior by blaming the previous administration forever. And for the record, I was just as opposed to Bush's big government as I am to Obama's mongo-sized one.

Consider this statement from comments to my blog, by way of example.
About the Tea Party:
"In this case, it was instigated and coordinated by right-wing lobbyists, the Republican Party and Fox News as well as the rest of the conservative media as a means of bashing Obama and rallying support to an otherwise floundering GOP."

If you disagree with any part of the Vision of the Annointed, not only are you "seen as being in error, but in sin" (as Sowell writes in The Vision of the Annointed, p. 3), and further, you are seen as being unable to think for yourself, and told that you are being manipulated; the Annointed worry about you, concerned that you might "get mixed up with these people." But actually, their whole purpose is to paint those who disagree as partisan and manipulated, so that discussion never rises to any meaningful level where opposing views are seen as equally sincere. As Sowell says about the level of argument:

"What is remarkable is how few arguments are really engaged in, and how many substitutes for arguments there are . . . Many of these so called "thinking people" (EHL: the Annointed) could be more accurately characterized as articulate people, as people whose verbal nimbleness can elude both evidence and logic." (p. 5-6).

So what happens as more and more people run afoul of the maze of contradictory regulations and limitations to our liberty imposed by the well-meaning Nanny State?

This month, I opened my copy of Reason Magazine to read about some at least slightly granola DIY'ers who have run afoul of the new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), the purported purpose of which is to protect our kids from lead-laced toys from China. Like many recent regulations however, the law actually has the result of destroying of American-based small toymaker's businesses because of the onerous and expensive testing requirements. (For much, much more about CPSIA link through here and here). Need I say that these American small businesses, run by crunchy capitalists, have never marketed products containing lead?

The DIY'ers, who believed that the harm the regulations would do to their businesses was an oversight by Congress, formed organizations, like the Handmade Toy Alliance (the second "here" in the paragraph above), to get the law amended. And they found out that the party they usually supported was not on their side. Consider the hipster mom and home-based businesswoman Cecilia Leibovitz:

"Before the legislation," says Leibovitz, “I’d never really gotten involved politically. I’ve just tried to work in my own life.” But a lot of what she thought she knew about the political process turned out to be wrong. She was discouraged to discover how little power citizens, and even individual lawmakers, have over legislation. Consumer safety groups, she says, ended up getting exactly what they wanted.
“I’ve been supportive of some of these groups,” she says. “I actually blogged about this safety issue in 2007, thinking we were just focusing on problem products. I didn’t realize how massive the law would be and how many products it would cover.” " (Reason Magazine, June 2009, p. 44)

And she discovered something else:

"“What it looks like is that our needs are largely being responded to by Republicans. Most of the people in the Homemade Toy Alliance are probably more aligned with the Democratic side. And people in the Homemade Toy Alliance kind of like the things that these consumer groups are touting, like safer products and natural things.” But now she finds herself in this “weird alliance.” " (ibid).

Leibovitz is still seeing this as a partisan issue, and it's hard for her not to, because Congress has very few members who are not allied with the major parties. But this is really an issue about the power of government, and like many of us before her, her awakening is beginning as she understands that the Congress is more concerned about the big lobby groups and multinational corporations that they represent, than they are about her freedom and prosperity.

To add insult to injury, as children's toys and clothes are being pulled from thrift-store shelves, and are even destroyed, and children's books are being targeted, the political activities of these small business owners is being cast into the standard partisan rhetoric by the progressive media. The very real concerns of opponents to this very bad piece of legislation have been labeled as "alarmist" and the people themselves have been called "conspiracy theorists" and "fear-mongers" by such progressive media as the New York Times.

As Jennifer Grinnell of LivingPlaything.com posted:

". . .The sad fact about larger public discussions in the US these days is how politicized almost every subject has become. In an ‘us’ and ‘them’ environment, we seem to have lost [sight] of the fact that perhaps we, the citizens who find fault with this law, actually have a legitimate point and are not trying to advance an ideology or nefarious political agenda.” (As quoted in Reason Magazine, June 2009, p. 47).

Their sense of betrayal towards their government, and their awakening understanding that their concerns are being cast as a "nefarious political agenda" is well understood by many of us who have trod the same road in years past, awakened by other issues. I was a more than slightly crunchy mom, and my awakening and return to my libertarian roots (second generation and proud of it!) was catalized by 9-11 and home education. As I began to realize that Annointed statists and do-gooders wanted to control what I teach my children, and how I raise them, I understood that all that stands between me and absolute tyranny is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And unless I am willing to trust my fellow citizens of all beliefs and walks of life to manage their own lives, I will not have the freedom to manage mine.

The rhetoric of the Obamaniacs is wearing thin. The tea parties, the 9-12 movement, and patriot groups springing up everywhere understand that this is not about partisan politics, and take no regard of what the vaunted Fourth Estate is saying to itself. (No wonder they aren't making any money). As the toymakers will find out, the Republican party is as morally bankrupt as are the Democrats. They are, with very few exceptions, self-aggrandizing statists whose whole agenda is power and privilege. And they have bought the "opinion makers" with the bread and circuses inside the beltway.

Out here in "flyover country", we don't want to be ruled by the Annointed. And we are tired of paying for their folly.

The Chicago Boss in the White House

We all knew that President Obama was in bed with the Chicago mob. Nobody rises that far that fast in Illinois politics otherwise. And the Chicago mob is in bed with the Unions. (For a comprehesive list of sources, see David Horowitz's The Shadow Party, chapter 9).

What did Obama voters who were fund managers or worked for them, or who were bond holders expect?

Those of us who read Mike Royko's Boss tried to tell them. (Yes, I'm that old and yes, I grew up in Illinois. New Mexico's corrupt patron system seems positively amateurish to me).

From The Business Insider:

" . . . sources familiar with the matter say that other firms felt they were threatened as well. None of the sources would agree to speak except on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of political repercussions.

The sources, who represent creditors to Chrysler, say they were taken aback by the hardball tactics that the Obama administration employed to cajole them into acquiescing to plans to restructure Chrysler. One person described the administration as the most shocking "end justifies the means" group they have ever encountered. Another characterized Obama was "the most dangerous smooth talker on the planet- and I knew Kissinger." Both were voters for Obama in the last election."

More links at the Wall Street Journal.

And here is an excerpt from a letter written by Clifton F. Asness, the founding principal of AQR Capital Management, and a man unafraid to speak his mind:

"The President has just harshly castigated hedge fund managers for being unwilling to take his administration’s bid for their Chrysler bonds. He called them “speculators” who were “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else” and who wanted “to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.”

"The responses of hedge fund managers have been, appropriately, outrage, but generally have been anonymous for fear of going on the record against a powerful President (an exception, though still in the form of a “group letter,” was the superb note from “The Committee of Chrysler Non-TARP Lenders,” some of the points of which I echo here, and a relatively few firms, like Oppenheimer, that have publicly defended themselves). Furthermore, one by one the managers and banks are said to be caving to the President’s wishes out of justifiable fear.

". . . Let’s be clear, it is the job and obligation of all investment managers, including hedge fund managers, to get their clients the most return they can. They are allowed to be charitable with their own money, and many are spectacularly so, but if they give away their clients’ money to share in the “sacrifice,” they are stealing. Clients of hedge funds include, among others, pension funds of all kinds of workers, unionized and not.

"The managers have a fiduciary obligation to look after their clients’ money as best they can, not to support the President, nor to oppose him, nor otherwise advance their personal political views. That’s how the system works. If you hired an investment professional and he could preserve more of your money in a financial disaster, but instead he decided to spend it on the UAW so you could “share in the sacrifice,” you would not be happy. " (Emphasis mine. EHL)
Hat tip goes to Cafe Hayek: Speaking Truth to Power.

The Committee of Chrysler Non-TARP Lenders statement ends with the most important point:

". . . As we all appreciate, laws are the foundation of our economy and society. Despite recent travails, our country remains the economic envy of the world and the United States remains a vital engine of global growth. The rule of law made it that way. We urge that people remember this and not succumb to unproductive and unwarranted finger pointing."

With his statement calling these organizations (who represent "teachers, pensioners, and retirees") "speculators" who are "unwilling to sacrifice," Obama clearly demonstrates that he may be a lawyer, but that he does not respect the rule of law. We learned this when we heard his Chicago Public Radio interview, when he stated that the Constitution is flawed because it does not allow the government to take your wealth and redistribute it to others. Normally, we call that theft.

Well, those Obama voters with money are learning. They will always lose to the Progressive thuggery that now resides in the White House. They will lose, no matter how pristine their political credentials are, no matter how they protest. They will lose, because they have something to loot. In the immortal words of Willie Sutton, "That's where the money is."

And nobody knows how to loot like a Chicago politician.

Welcome to lawlessness, Chicago Mob style.

Who will Obama come after when he is finished looting Wall Street? He and his ilk will come after you and me. And our children.

He is already doing it. He is going after the funds of teachers and retirees in order to pay off his political obligations. Politicians and mobsters will take from us what they cannot produce.

Get ready to be looted.

A Different View of Obama's European Tour

Here in the United States, many of us have been dismayed by President Obama's behavior on his recent trip to Europe. My dismay started even earlier with his treatment of our closest allies, when the Prime Minister of England came to the United States.

I was further dismayed when our president, who represents the United States of America--that is US--went to Europe and told leaders in Strasbourg that America has been arrogant and derisive. (Like when the US engaged in considerable sacrifice to save Europe from the National Socialists of Germany and the fascists of Italy? Oh, I forgot, Obama means to bring European style socialism to the US. And as for fascism--well, look at the takeover of private companies). He cravenly apologized for our history while at the same time chiding Europe for the very anti-Americanism he was displaying. (Which is the real message?) And that bow to the tyrant of Saudi Arabia? Please. Americans are not subjects, we are free citizens. We bow to no man. If we, the citizens do not, then, as our representative, neither should Obama. No matter how much oil the king controls.

(For a detailed analysis of the meaning of the bow, see Ed Cline's discussion at the Rule of Reason ).

When is this man going to quit campaigning for love and adulation and actually own the presidency?

But apparently, these insults are small potatoes to us, compared to what was communicated to our democratic allies across the globe. For example, I read this from Caroline Glick at The Jerusalem Post:

"Somewhere between apologizing for American history - both distant and recent; genuflecting before the unelected, bigoted king of Saudi Arabia; announcing that he will slash the US's nuclear arsenal, scrap much of America's missile defense programs and emasculate the US Navy; leaving Japan to face North Korea and China alone; telling the Czechs, Poles and their fellow former Soviet colonies, "Don't worry, be happy," as he leaves them to Moscow's tender mercies; humiliating Iraq's leaders while kowtowing to Iran; preparing for an open confrontation with Israel; and thanking Islam for its great contribution to American history, President Obama made clear to the world's aggressors that America will not be confronting them for the foreseeable future.

Whether they are aggressors like Russia, proliferators like North Korea, terror exporters like nuclear-armed Pakistan or would-be genocidal-terror-supporting nuclear states like Iran, today, under the new administration, none of them has any reason to fear Washington."

Later she says this:

"AMERICA'S BETRAYAL of its democratic allies makes each of them more vulnerable to aggression at the hands of their enemies - enemies the Obama administration is now actively attempting to appease. And as the US strengthens their adversaries at their expense, these spurned democracies must consider their options for surviving as free societies in this new, threatening, post-American environment. "

The entire column is definitely worth reading as it elucidates a viewpoint that is different than how Americans, though equally dismayed, see the Obama European tour.

As for what America's enemies are thinking, we do not know for sure. And we are unlikely to find out via civilized means such as the press or blogs. If we do find out, the knowledge will come more suddenly and violently, as an exploitation of the percieved weakness of American leadership.

I fear for my country. I fear for the world.

G-d save the United States of America.

On a Clear Day You Can See Government Motors

This morning as I drove the Boychick to school, I turned on the radio.
I heard that President Obama had fired the CEO of GM.

My first sensation was a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I almost had to pull Henry, the Big Red Truck (it's a Ford!) to the side of Frost Road.
My first thought was: Welcome to the USSA!





Does anyone remember the Yugo?

Going Galt?

Last night, her Knight Errant out of town on business, the Chemistry Geek Princess came home for Shabbat dinner. She did not bring the granddog this time because our new girl, Shayna is extremely timid, and Ruby the Granddog's very extraverted, puppy ways would have sent Shayna Sunshine to her corner for a week

We lit candles, we sang Shalom Aleichem, Malachei ha-Malakim, we blessed the children--including the 23 year old--the Engineering Geek read Eyshet Chayil (A Woman of Valor), we made Kidush over the wine, we made the blessing for bread.


It was all very pleasant, but as we began the main course, the talk turned to literature which turned quickly to the state of the Republic.


The Chem Geek Princess began by saying: "I am re-reading Atlas Shrugged, and this time through I am noticing that the words on the page reflect reality even more starkly than they did last summer." She went on to talk about the Bank President with a Heart in the book, who loaned money to people who needed it even though they could not afford the loans, and who was thereby responsible for bringing down the economy of Wisconsin, making it a blighted area with no industry and no future. Then she said, "You know, that is a literary version of what actually happened when the Community Reinvestment Act forced the financials to lend money for people to buy houses, people who could not afford those houses and those loans. Then the banks failed and . . . well, here we are."


We went on talking seriously about the economy, the stimulus that isn't one, and the fact that it won't work and that it cannot work. The CGP went on to talk about the Laffer Curve, and how she sees it's basic truth because she knows a lot of people in small businesses that will make more than $250,000, and they are already finding many ways to either cut that down to $249,000 (at least on paper) or are looking to shelter their money in other ways, so that they don't have to start producing less or laying off workers.


The talk turned to the galloping socialism that the Obama adminstration wants to introduce to our country, in the middle of the night. The CGP is very angry because, as she puts it, this administration is selling her future and children's future to his "utopian nightmare." They will be paying a tax rate of 60 -80 percent, just to pay off what Obama and Bush have borrowed in the past six months for the bailouts and the stimuli. She pointed out that she, a mortgage holder for a a very small house in an older neighborhood of Albuquerque, is going to have to pay off the mortgages of people who foolishly bought houses they could not afford. She and others like her, will have the crushing debt of the irresponsible to deal with, making it impossible to ever get ahead. "It's tax slavery, Mom!" she said indignantly. "Why should I bother to work hard and be responsible when the sweat of my brow will be taken by force to pay mortgages for those people who were not so responsible and who are likely to lose those houses anyway? Why should I have to pay to keep the financials that made the bad loans in the business of paying huge bonuses to failing CEOs?"


Why should she indeed? Soon, it's not going to be worth it for her to earn more, to create more, to work harder, because the harder she works, the more the fruit of her efforts will be taken from her by force to support nameless others who do not work as hard as she does. She will not reap the rewards of her effort, she will not be able to put by money for her children's future (as we did for her).


This is what Santelli meant when he said, "The government is promoting bad behavior!" And the nameless trader said, "It's a moral hazard." (See the Shout Heard 'Round the World if you haven't already).


We then began to discuss the story of Twentieth Century Motors as told by the tramp who had worked there, a key piece of plot in Atlas Shrugged. The story illustrates the inevitable result of forcing the Marxist principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" on free human beings. What happened in the factory is that when the old man died, his heirs got the workers to vote in the use of this principle for the factory and its workers. They were to be all one big family, they thought. And the workers voted for it, because, in the words of the tramp who'd once been a skilled worker:


"There wasn't a man among us who didn't think that under a setup of this kind he 'd muscle in on the profits of the men abler than himself. There wasn't a man who . . . didn't think that somebody wasn't richer or smarter, and this plan wouldn't give him a share of his better's wealth and brains. But while he was thinking that he'd get unearned benefits from the men above, he forgot about the men below who would get unearned benefits from him . . .The worker who liked the idea that his need entitled him to a limousine like his boss's, forgot that every bum and beggar on earth would come howling that their need entitled them to an icebox like his own . . ." (Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged, Centennial Edition, p. 666, italics in the original).


So the workers who "played it straight" and put forth their best efforts soon found out that they would not be able to have butter on their bread until everybody else had bread; that their children could not go to college until everybody else sent their children to high school. And of course, there were those that gamed the system and brought in every "worthless relative from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for the extra disability allowance." And since ability and need were decided by a vote, there was an endless drain on those who were responsible. Those who worked hard were forced to work harder, in order to provide for the endlessly growing need of those who did not. And since human beings do not like to be slaves, what happened next was predictable:


"We began to hide what ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks that we never worked any better or faster than the next fellow. . . We knew that for every stinker who'd ruin a batch of motors and cost the company money . . . it's we who'd pay with our nights and our Sundays . . . What was it they told us about the vicious competition of the profit system where men had to compete for who'd do a better job than his fellows? Vicious, was it? Well, they should have seen what it was like when we all had to compete with one another for who'd do the worst job possible . . . Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could never pay off . . ." (Ibid. p. 662-663).


The story of the factory in Atlas Shrugged is not real, but is an illustration of the consequences of the idea placed in closed system. But this kind of behavior is the consequence of the redistribution of wealth writ large or small, wherever it has been tried. When Stalin starved the peasants off their land, the result was famine for all, because the peasants weren't willing to work hard and well to benefit others when they received no benefit from their work themselves. And in the United States, at the height of the Great Society, when the marginal tax rate (defined as the tax on every dollar over a set amount) became greater than 90%, people began making sure that they did not earn a dollar more than that margin. Ronald Reagan did just this, and stopped working as an actor mid-year when he reached the marginal limit. This caused him to change his party affiliation and work for the Goldwater campaign. The Beatles protested the same kind of "tax-the-rich" scheme in their song The Taxman, and then moved their business to Holland.


President Obama's plans to "spread the wealth around" (as he put it to Joe the Plumber) will not result in stimulating the economy. It will result in tax slavery for generations of Americans who work and pay taxes. And don't think that everybody who works will have their wealth confiscated equally. Remember, those will pull in Washington don't have to pay their taxes. (Think of the tax cheats now in Obama's cabinet). No, it will be ordinary, ambitious Americans who will see their dreams stifled and their savings taken from them as they are condemned to work and leave it up to the Obamas of the world "to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life." (Atlas Shrugged, p. 670).


There comes a point when it is not worth it work to earn beyond one's subsistence; a point when the tax rate makes a rising income and rising productivity a liability. This is where our children may well find themselves due to the spending without reason or end, as the federal government spends trillions that it does not have to prop up industries and businesses that cannot succeed.


And this is why many hard-working young Americans are thinking of Going Galt.

The Chem Geek Princess is one of them.
Oh, she is not thinking of trying to find the mythical Galt's Gulch in a valley in Colorado.
She is trying to figure out how not to earn past the margin, where the fruit of the days of her work will be taken from her to pay for Peggy Joseph's mortgage and gasoline.


And many of the rest of us are "going Galt" too. We are doing it by planting gardens, trading favors among neighbors, becoming frugal. Paying fewer taxes by making less money and buying fewer things. We are doing it by taking our money out of the stock market, not counting on that 401K cum 201K, refusing to invest in bonds and currencies that will soon have no value. This is why every time Paulsen opened his mouth, and every time Geithner opens his, the stock market falls. A whole lot of us know that we are being scammed into tax slavery.


The press elites call us wingnuts, but we are the ones paying their salaries, and those of the pols and bureaucrats, too.


The press elites may sneer, but many of us are preparing ourselves and our children to be able to ride out the storm and we are working to protect our rights. We are organizing ourselves to demand a redress of our grievances from our government by having Tea Parties and the 2009 Continental Congress. We are gathering to remind our servant government that We Surround Them. We are gathering at the Campaign for Liberty to remind our public servants that they are elected at our pleasure for the purpose of protecting our Liberty. This is what happens when you try to foist "from each according to his ability to each according to his need" on a free people.


Are you listening, Mr. President? We're going Galt.

Outrageous! House Passed Bill No One Had Read!

The House passed the so-called stimulus bill this morning.
What is outrageous is that the compromise bill became available for members to read at 11PM last night and the vote was rushed because Nancy Pelosi had to catch a plane for a nine-day trip to Europe this evening so that she would not miss an awards dinner!
(I smell something rotten in Denmark!).

The bill was 1000 pages long, and eight inches thick, and We the People had been promised that it would be posted for a reasonable amount of time so that everyone would know what was in it.

This bill was largest spending bill in the history of the world.
The Obama administration took a leaf from the pages of the Bush administration's handling of the Patriot Act, and used fear tactics to get it passed quickly.
That is all outrageous enough, but today it is our representatives that acted irresponsibly.
How can they know that this is a good bill if they haven't read it?
It does not matter if your Congress Critters were for or against this spending plan.
They owed it to themselves and to their constituents to READ it before they vote.
They should have voted against the rules for this vote, and they should have turned down the bill until it was made available for a reasonable time.

A responsible Congress Critter would have abstained at the very least, and voted it down at best.
When will We the People call them to account?
We should have learned after the Patriot Act, and if we are particularly dense, we should have learned from the Monster Bailout with the Missing Money that was passed last fall.

Even if you believe that the government should take action-- and I don't--this does not mean that any action is as good as any other.
Hurrying down the rocky road to disaster is a foolish move, no matter how often taken out of panic. Our representatives owe it to themselves, and to us, to READ the bills they vote on in order to prevent panic moves that could cause more problems than they solve.

So much for accountability and transparency. Our children and their children will be paying for this bill, and the accountants for the Federal Government are saying this might do more harm than good.

Arrrgh! Tar and feathers is too good for these clowns we have elected!
But I am afraid that telephone calls will have to do.
Call your representatives to account to you. You are their boss.

We've got a government out of control.
It's time to take our country back!

The Problem with Geithner

The problem is his integrity.

He did not pay taxes that the IMF clearly informed him that he owed, and when he was audited, he still did not make good on all of the back taxes. He also continued to play fast and loose with the system.

And his name has just been sent to the full Senate for confirmation.
The committee passed him, despite all of this, because he's the genius that will fix our economy. Even though he couldn't understand Turbo Tax. (It's pretty simple, really. You hit the prompt that says "self-employed"). Not to mention the fact that the IMF not only apprised him of his tax obligation each quarter, but also wrote him a check intended to cover his tax obligation. So he kept the money from the IMF and did not pay the taxes.

Now many of us ordinary citizens have trouble with our taxes, but if we made this mistake we would pay fines, back taxes, and interest on what we owed. We might be terrorized by the IRS for years to come. Geithner has not experienced that. Apparently, there is not one law for the citizen and the politician in the United States.

What concerns me the most, though, is not Geithner's lack of integrity, although that is a big concern. What concerns me, is that our Senators and Representatives do not think it matters. After all, Geithner is the genius that came up with TARP, which was such an innovative solution that it was not used. So the congress critters have persuaded themselves that he is the only person who can save our economy from certain crash. And this bothers me quite a lot more.

First, the assumption that any one person can save an economy, any economy, by spending money we don't have defies common sense. It is what F.A. Hayek called The Fatal Conceit. Secondly, is it really possible that among a population of more than 303 million people this one, clearly flawed man is the only person who is qualified to be Secretary of the Treasury? This man who can't get his taxes right is the only person to put in charge of the IRS, the bailouts, and the printing presses at the US Treasury?

This kind of desire for a magic solution to all our problems is the same idolatry that made the Obamaniacs so nauseating. Our founders did not set up our system of government to depend on one man. As Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights... Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power... Our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
--Thomas Jefferson: Draft Kentucky Resolutions, 1798. ME 17:388

Ours is a government of law, not of men.
Should we then give the power over our money, which was unconstitutionally given to the Secretary of the Treasury by our venal politicians last October, over to a man who violates that law? Who, at best, is a genius who cannot understand the portions of the law that he will be charged with enforcing by virtue of his position over the IRS? Should this man have the power to deprive citizens who violate the same code he did of their rights to liberty and property?

I cannot believe that this is practically a done deal.
We have been told today that although his tax code violations would have been a problem in more ordinary times, these extraordinary times make his lack of integrity unimportant.
What? Does this mean that since these times are so extraordinary, the law does not now apply? Isn't it precisely in extraordinary times that character and integrity become extraordinaryly important? In The Crisis, Thomas Paine wrote:

"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value." (December, 1776).

Will a man who, when times were good, did not pay his taxes, and kept the money given to him by the IMF for that purpose, have the integrity to make lawful decisions about our money in these extraordinary times? I think his soul has been tried and found wanting.

We the People of the United States, deserve and should demand accountable leaders who have the courage of their convictions, and the integrity to uphold the Constitution. No one man is the solution to all of our problems. We make the solutions. And as for our leaders, we must "bind [them] down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution."

And we lack wisdom if we do not protest the placement of a man who has already done mischief with his own money in charge of the national purse.