Freedom Choice Cost

Homeless in Sarasota

2012-01-31T12:23:00.001-05:00

By Dean Kalahar

Back in the days of TV’s Andy Griffith, Otis Campbell, the town drunk, would put himself in jail so as not to bother anyone in Mayberry. The sensibilities back then were straight forward, show compassion to Otis’s humanity, but hold him accountable for his decisions and behavior while protecting private and public property.

Today this idea is anathema to many homeless advocates in Sarasota who favor more government support and protections. Others however, are concerned about the unintended consequences of allowing people to live at will on the streets. Let’s take a closer look.

According to The Heritage Foundation, homelessness is usually a transitional condition; with individuals who lose housing typically residing in an emergency shelter for a few weeks or months before re-entering permanent housing. In 2009 only one out of 180 poor persons was homeless in the literal sense of being on the street and without shelter. Studies also show that on a typical night shelters have an average vacancy rate of 10 percent so there are enough beds to meet the need.

Since more people become temporarily homeless over the course of a year than are homeless at any single point in time, most homeless people are one time victims. Trumped up homeless totals are actually describing different people at different times, not a monolithic group of downtrodden as reported.

As you can see “the homeless” is a poor description of the individuals the community is concerned about. A more accurate description would be: vagrants, bums, beggars, or pan handlers. Granted, some individuals are wandering the streets due to psychiatric or substance abuse problems and many avenues of help are offered in the community. No one is begrudging private charities, churches, and families that have historically took the lead in offering assistance and hope to those whose free will is broken.

But it is unacceptable to defend those who defecate in public, commit crime, and engage in behaviors that violate property rights. Advocates who demand loose non-judgmental public policies out of a sense of guilt, pity, and self promoting compassion only lead vagrants into dependence and despondence in lieu of personal responsibility and dignity.

The role of government is to protect people and their property so their responsibility in addressing the vagrant issue must defend a larger moral principle. Morality is based on the simple idea that anything that harms a person or his property is immoral. For example, murder, rape, theft, or vandalism is immoral and there are criminal laws against such acts. Even behaviors that cause property values to be diminished can be seen as immoral so consistent laws must also be applied to protect abuses that are seen and must be foreseen.

The private property of people, homeowners, and businesses have the right not to have their persons or property harmed, damaged, disrupted, and capital destroyed as a result of the free choice made by vagrants. Citing and arresting vagrants who cause property to be harmed by direct or indirect means is morally right and as such is lawful policy.

Likewise, public property also has a moral component attached. The government has the responsibility to regulate and protect public property so it can be used and enjoyed equally. Vagrants that behave in ways that negate this social contract should be cited and removed just like any other citizen who is violating the rule of law on public land.

In short, vagrants have the right to their persons and property under the rule of law, but they do not have the right to harm the property of others.

Soaring rhetoric to protect “the homeless” based on feelings of social justice violates the very rights and moral basis do-gooders claim they want to protect. Oxymoronic policies that create the incentives for more dependency and despondence epitomize what can only be called immoral compassion.

T.S. Eliot summed up the psychological reality of those who want government policy to embrace vagrants. “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

Even Barney Fife understood these lessons.
'

The "pop" that will make the housing bubble seem like a snap.

2012-01-27T12:10:00.010-05:00

The government is monetizing their debt under the cover of the FED who is creating a monetary bubble to prop up and profit their banks.

By Dean Kalahar

January 27, 2012

David Malpass in the Wall Street Journal zeros in on a very complex and troubling situation going on within the Federal Government and the Federal Reserve.

Near-zero interest rates penalize savers and channel artificially cheap capital to government, big corporations and foreign countries. One of the most fundamental principles of economics is that holding prices artificially low causes shortages. When something of value is free, it runs out fast and only the well-connected get any. Interest rates are the price for credit and shouldn't be controlled at zero. It causes cheap credit for those with special access but shortages for those without—primarily new and small businesses and those seeking private-sector mortgages.

The economy's exit from Fed dominance of bond markets wouldn't be traumatic. The Fed has been fully sterilizing its asset purchases, meaning all the cash it has used to buy bonds is still contained at the Fed, not multiplied in the private sector. The Fed accomplishes this through bank regulation and by borrowing from banks at above-market interest rates—$1.5 trillion as of Jan. 18.

So the Federal Reserve (FED) is buying US government bonds and then they -as well as the administration, i.e. Dodd-Frank- are regulating member banks so as to keep the money that was used to buy the bonds from being lent to consumers.

The FED then borrows money from these same Federal Reserve banks and pays them interest greater than the rate set by the FED which is zero.

The FED thus soaks up the potential liquidity and the reserve banks make “no risk” money without having to lend dollars to consumers or cause inflation.

Since the member banks own the FED, the central bank also shares in the member banks profit. Dollars are thus not put into circulation but the banks become very profitable on the books/balance sheets which creates a multiplier effect in expanding the number of dollars without printing more dollars.

The result is tremendous hidden inflation as the purchasing power of each dollar declines as the number of dollars on paper goes up. As Malpass states, “the FED balance sheet is up 250% since 2008.”

The lack of transparency keeps the scheme all but hidden.

In the meantime, consumers/the market flock to gold as they feel their currency is being devalued by the Treasury Department and the FED.

At some point, as all schemes do, this will collapse and the inflation bomb will be unleashed.

In short the government is monetizing their debt under the cover of the FED who is creating a monetary bubble to prop up and profit their banks that upon its “pop” will make the housing bubble seem like a snap.

As Dennis Miller once said: “that is just exquisite bull s__t.”
`

President Obama and the Magna Carta

2012-01-05T15:23:00.003-05:00

By Dean Kalahar

The Magna Carta ended the idea that anyone, especially monarchs, are above the law.

Unfortunately. President Obama has appointed Richard Cordray to run the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, part of the Dodd-Frank law passed to regulate Wall Street. Under this law, executive appointments must be approved by the Senate unless the senate is adjourned.

The problem is the so called “recess appointment” was made while the Senate is in pro forma session not recess. This is in direct violation of Article 2, section 2 of the Constitution. A pro forma session satisfies the constitutional obligation that neither chamber can adjourn for more than three days without the consent of the other.

Why would a supposed Constitutional scholar like President Obama even think to agree to such a process?

Because if anyone raises a concern to the illegal appointment, and the President has calculated a Republican running for President will object; he will turn it around and say those against the appointment are “against consumer protection.” He will go to say the GOP only want to protect “rich fat cats” on “wall street,” while he, of course, is fighting to protect the “little guy.” In short he will all but parrot the tired and hackneyed liberal rhetoric that evil Republicans want to hurt their fellow Americans.

This is in line with the class warfare tactics being used by the President to divide and conquer in hopes of being re-elected. The ends justify the means, even if the means ignore the Constitution and tear apart the country.

Opponents of Obama will probably say nothing and allow the abuse of power to go unchecked. Instead they should be clearly explaining the political game in simple terms, exposing Obama’s condescension toward Americas limited Constitutional governance, and holding the executive branch accountable to the rule of law. Supporters of the president who claim to defend the Constitution will be mute.

This may be exquisite Machiavellian politics on the part of an Imperial President who has acted as if he is above the law, but it is an unprecedented abuse of power. With the exception of Marbury v. Madison or the court packing of FDR, our nation has not encountered such willful disregard of the Constitution that all elected officials swear under oath to uphold.

When the rule of law that has been defended with American blood is held in such low regard and politicized for personal gain to increase the power to rule over the people, the Republic is on shaky grounds. The administrations clever use of politics has gone too far this time. Undermining the Constitution in order to gain additional power is tyranny in its purest form.

Government by the consent of the governed must not be manipulated. The appointments must be rescinded, thrown out by the courts, or the President must be Impeached by the House of Representatives in accordance with the Constitution.

The Great Charter, signed in 1215, has served us well up to this point. Principles must trump politics.

What is “rich” in Sarasota?

2011-12-12T12:20:00.004-05:00

By Dean Kalahar

Class warfare and income redistribution rhetoric has always been fashionable among self anointed protestors and politicians who play the old game of divide and conquer, telling us the greedy “rich” need to “pay their fair share.” This would be tedious if it did not have serious implications for tearing communities apart, including our own. Let’s take a look.

According to IRS data, there are 1.38 million Americans in the top 1% earning at least $343,927 a year. This is a generous living but hardly the cash flow to purchase a corporate jet and luxury yacht. There are 138,000 Americans in the top .1% earning over 2 million a year. They more truly represent the vision we have of “rich,” but only equal .04% of the population.

Going even further, we can say “rich” and attach images of Oprah and Gates, two of the 5,309 people who make over ten million a year, but comparing .004% of the population to the 330 million other Americans to define the economic fabric of our nation is statistically meaningless.

What do Americans earn? 91.7% make less than $100,000 a year, with 71% making between $0 and $50,000 and 20.7 % making between $50,000 and $100,000. Only 8.3% of Americans earn over $100,000 year while 1.8% earn over $200,000. Good incomes to be sure but hardy “rich” once Uncle Sam takes his cut.

Focusing on the extreme ends of the earning scale to define “rich” versus “poor” is like comparing Warren Buffet to a homeless person. Elites who smugly spew indignation to protect a frail sense of self may create moral melodrama, but choosing the vivid exception to statistical truth does not trump demographic realities. In short, the vast swath of Americans make between $25,000 and $75,000 a year. Instead of being a nation of “rich” and “poor,” we are a nation of income equity and mobility.

Sarasota County is no different. The average adjusted income per household is $55,157. So why do we see opulence here in Sarasota? Because the so called ‘rich” spent the better part of a lifetime working hard at building a business or career, saving and investing for a rainy day, paying off a home and planning for their future. They no longer work, and live off their investment income and social security, but they certainly have paid their “fair share” along the way.

Many locals may live well now, but what is unseen are the years of scrimping and saving that went towards the ability for Sarasota seniors to live out their retirement years with some degree of comfort. Contrary to the static class system argument of neo-hippy malcontents, there is an easy explanation for America’s narrow income variations.

Experience, time, and age must be factored into any income analysis. Young people have fewer skills and earn less; older people have more skills and earn more. Incomes increase over time.

The “have” and “have-nots” are not different people, just people at different stages of their lives. The top 20% retire while the bottom 20% increase their human capital and move up while younger workers enter the workforce and continue the cycle. $66 thousand a year gets you into the top 25%.

Likewise, the bottom 20% does not mean “skid row.” There are the painfully poor 3.5%, but most of the people in the bottom 20% in America do not live on the streets or remain there for very long.

The “poor” in America are far richer in real economic terms than the rich in many places around the globe. Defining poverty and affluence is difficult when the bottom 20% in America has a higher standard of living than the top 20% in many other countries.

Income and class mobility is also a dominant feature in America. An absolute majority of people in the bottom 20% move into the top 20% in less than twenty years. Treasury Dept. studies show incomes in the bottom 20% grow at a much faster rate than in the top 20%, while the top1% actually move down in income and bracket over time. Factoring for inflation, the median income of all tax filers increased 24% over the ten year period studied.

The economy is not a zero sum game where the benefit of one comes at the cost to another. The class warfare attack on the “rich” is really an argument against free markets, wealth creation, and life saving economic growth. Polarizing citizens based on highly subjective emotional terms like “rich” and “poor” is counterproductive at best and immoral at worst.

Free market entrepreneurial capitalism allowed for the success of Apple’s Steve Jobs. Attacking the “rich” to pay their “fair share” through forced income redistribution will mean less Apples, jobs, and prosperity.
`

The History of Thanksgiving

2011-11-22T20:20:00.004-05:00

A primary source guide

By Dean Kalahar
November 22, 2011

Much is said about the history of Thanksgiving. As educators and social scientists, it is important to teach America’s cultural foundations; for if we forget who we are and where we came from, we will face a cultural rot that will destroy us from within.

There are only two contemporary accounts of the 1621 Thanksgiving: First is Edward Winslow's account, which he wrote in a letter dated December 12, 1621. It speaks of the feast and sharing of food with the Indians.

“Our corn [i.e. wheat] did prove well, and God be praised, we had a goodincrease of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown. They came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom. Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors.They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside,served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”

The second description was written about 1641 by William Bradford in his History Of Plymouth Plantation. It is in this account that the Thanksgiving turkey tradition is founded.

“They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercising in fishing, about cod and bass andother fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many,besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck of meal a week to a person,or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion. Which made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports.”

But the story of what the Pilgrims and modern Americans give thanks for every Thanksgiving has a deeper and more profound meaning than most Americans know. To understand Thanksgiving we must first return to Jamestown with the help of David Boaz.

In 1607, 105 men and boys, mostly indentured servants who held no private property and were to work for the “common store,” disembarked from three ships and established the first permanent settlement in America.

There were the usual hardships of pioneers far from home, such as unfamiliar diseases. There were mixed relations with the Indians already living in Virginia. Sometimes the Indians and settlers traded, other times armed conflicts broke out.

By 1609, there were 500 settlers, including women. And yet within six months fewer than 100 were still alive during what came to be known as "the starving time." Why? According to a governor of the colony, George Percy, most of the colonists died of famine, despite the “good and fruitful” soil, the abundant deer and turkey, and the “strawberries, raspberries and fruits unknown” growing wild.

And yet people were desperate. They ate dogs and cats, then rats and mice. They apparently ate their deceased neighbors. And some said that one man murdered and ate his pregnant wife. By the spring, they had given up. They abandoned the fort and boarded ships to return to England. But, miraculously, as they sailed out of Chesapeake Bay, they encountered three ships with new recruits, so they turned around and tried to make another go of it. The additional settlers and supplies kept them alive.

When a new governor, Thomas Dale, arrived a year after the starving time, he was shocked to find the settlers bowling in the streets instead of working. Dale's most important reform was to institute private property. He understood that men who don't benefit from their hard work tend not to work very hard. As such he allotted every man three acres of land and freed them to work for themselves.

And then, the Virginia historian Matthew Page Andrews wrote, “As soon as the settlers were thrown upon their own resources, and each freeman had acquired the right of owning property, the colonists quickly developed what became the distinguishing characteristic of Americans—an aptitude for all kinds of craftsmanship coupled with an innate genius for experimentation and invention.” The Jamestown colony became a success, people from all over Europe flocked to the New World, and capitalism was born in America.

Ray Harvey writes that not many years later, in November of 1620, another group of American settlers — 101 of them, to be exact, this group not financed by the British government — arrived on the good ship Mayflower, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

These Pilgrims, as they were called, moved a short distance away to a place named Plymouth. They were not at all unaware of the early Jamestown disaster, the starvation, the disease, the famine; they were, however, unaware of what had caused it. Accordingly, they proceeded to make the identical mistake that the settlers of Jamestown had made: namely, collective ownership of land. And the Pilgrims too paid dearly for it. Within a few short months, half were dead.

Over the course of the next three years, 100 more settlers arrived from England to Plymouth, all of whom were barely able to feed themselves. As Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford wrote:

“Many [settlers] sold away their clothes and bed coverings [to the Indians]; others (so base were they) became servants of the Indians … and fetch them water for a capful of corn; others fell to plain stealing, both day and night, from the Indians…. In the end, they came to that misery that some starved to and died with cold and hunger. One in gathering shellfish was so weak as he stuck fast in the mud and was found dead in the place.”

But this same William Bradford would soon solve “the ruin and dissolution of his colony,” and he would do it in the exact same way Sir Thomas Dale had saved Jamestown.William Bradford wrote:

“After much debate of things … [it was decided that the Pilgrims] should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves … And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, for present use. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”

Bradford came to fully grasp how lack of property rights negates and indeed destroys the work incentive:

“Common course” was abandoned in favor of setting “every man for his own particular,” meaning private property. Instantaneously, those who had been indolent became “very industrious,” so much so that woman and men who had “previously pleaded frailty worked long and hard – once they saw how they and their families could benefit from such hard work.”

William Bradford went on to correctly identify the source of the “disastrous problem” as “that conceit of Plato’s,” who, in direct contrast to Aristotle, advocated collectivism and collective ownership of land, which, as history has repeatedly proven creates economic inefficiency and suffering.

Bradford even wrote later that those who mistakenly believed that communal property could make people “happy and flourishing” imagined themselves “wiser than God.”

The greatest lesson we can learn from this history of thaanksgiving? Freedom exercised through the natural rights of life, liberty, and property - promoted through an entrepreneurial free market economic system based on private property or capitalism- saved us in the beginning years of our nation. It is to those principles, tied to historical fact for which we celebrate Thanksgiving today.

Sources:
Mayflowerhistory.com
The Real History of Thanksgiving, Ray Harvey, November 24th, 2010
Private Property Saved Jamestown and, with it, America. By David Boaz,2007
Practical Economics, Dean Kalahar, 2008

Does the AICE program advance American interests?

2011-11-21T12:26:00.007-05:00

A closer look at the AICE Cambridge Global Perspectives course

By Dean Kalahar
November 21, 2011

Although highly organized, objectively evaluated, well intentioned, and packaged with some important academic objectives in mind, the AICE Global Perspectives course directly promotes or subtly guides students towards a vision of the world that can only be seen as counter to the principles of West civilization, American Exceptionalism, and Capitalism.

The curriculum in Global Perspectives states “The syllabus aims to develop active global citizens.” In addition, and in a stunningly disingenuous rejection of their own words and directives, the class description states:

“The course is not about getting everybody to think identically; rather it is a matter of opening minds to the great complexity of the world and of human thought, and opening hearts to the diversity of human experience and feeling.”

“The global issues provide a stimulating context through candidates can begin to develop the skills necessary to participate as active, global citizens and for practical application in further study.”

In less flowery words, AICE teachers will promote diversity through feelings not reason in order to develop skills as activists to promote a global citizenship agenda.

The syllabus offers an insightful example of how the academics in charge of developing curriculum are unaware of their bias.

A topic, such as Biodiversity and Ecosystem Loss, should not be undertaken only as a piece of empirical research e.g. into deforestation. The collection of relevant facts and information is clearly important, but what is also important is addressing the issues within the topic. What makes deforestation a matter of global import is not only the fact that about 20 per cent of tropical and sub-tropical forests have disappeared since the 1960s but also the effect of this loss on human (and animal and plant) life, both locally and globally. In general, human relations, with the planet and/or with each other, are at the centre of all global issues.”

There should be no doubt, the AICE developers are directing students to become activists for issues the AICE curriculum is directly advancing. The focus is to teach students what to think, instead of teaching them how to think.

If this is what taxpayers, parents, and students are looking for, then the AICE curriculum is a fine place to increase academic focus and discipline. If, however, taxpayers, parents, and students are unaware of the ideology being disseminated through AICE, it may be a good time to ask some tough questions to see if the program is appropriate.

To further back up these sentiments, the following are excerpts of core curriculum benchmarks taken directly from the AICE syllabus for the 2012 Global Perspectives course. Comments and potential concerns in parenthesis are mine.

Course
Benchmarks Focus questions for a global perspective

Biodiversity and ecosystem loss

Why are plant species threatened? How can existing material/mineral
resources be maintained? How would we judge whether the loss of a
number of plant or animal species constituted a disaster?
Are humans themselves becoming more, or less, diverse?

(sustainability, anti-capitalism ideology)

Climate Change
What causes climate change? What are the effects of climate change?
How do different countries approach climate change?

(global warming ideology)

Conflict and Peace
What is the role of the UN in times of conflict?
(Global government/law, anti-sovereignty ideology )

Disease and Health
Is access to good health care a right?
(Universal health care ideology)

Education for All
Does everyone have the right to an education?
(Global education, centralization of education ideology)
Employment
(Redistribution of wealth, command economic systems, “fair/living” wages, exploitation of workers, open boarders ideology)

Family and Demographic Change
Why do some countries have a high proportion of children, or of elderly people? What difficulties can this cause? What is a ‘family’? How/why has the family changed?
(anti-family, alternative family/lifestyle agenda, eugenics ideology)

Fuel and Energy
What are the world’s mineral resources used for? Which countries provide the most/ least? Which countries use the most/least? Who controls the prices? What kinds of fuels are the most environmentally friendly?
(Alternative energy, Anti-capitalism, anti-wealth, “green” ideology)

Humans and Other Species
How well do humans share the planet with other species? Are certain species more important than others? Should humans be permitted to ‘use’ other species to make human life easier/ better?
(Environmentalism, anti-west ideology)

Law and Criminality
Who decides which laws should be in force? What are the problems caused by different law systems in different countries?
(global government ,World court, anti-sovereignty ideology)

Poverty and Inequality
Why are some countries poorer than others and are all the people in these countries poor? How has the gap in equality changed between countries in recent years? In what way should richer countries be concerned about poverty in other countries?
(Anti-west, anti-capitalism, income redistribution ideology)

Trade and Aid
Who makes the rules? Why are some countries with plenty of natural resources poorer than some other countries? Do richer countries have a responsibility to help poorer countries?
(Income redistribution, anti-capitalism ideology)

Tradition, Culture and Identity
Why do people value tradition? Why do people divide into nations? Why do some people move from one country to another? How does this affect their lives? If we have ‘European citizens’, should we aim eventually for all people to be ‘World citizens’?
(global government, world citizenship, anti-sovereignty, open boarders ideology)

Transport and Infrastructure
(Promotes mass transit and control ideology)

Urbanisation
Why are more houses being built in many countries in the world? Should there be restrictions on house building?
(Anti-Israel settlement building, environmental ideology)

Water, Food and Agriculture
(over population, sustainability ideology)

Source: http://www.cie.org.uk/qualifications/academic/middlesec/igcse/subject?assdef_id=998

Memo to the occupy Wall Street protestors and class warfare politicians:

2011-11-07T15:49:00.005-05:00

If you’re against wealth, then you’re for suffering.

By Dean Kalahar

The Occupy Wall Street movement and class warfare politics we are experiencing is no less abhorrent than racism. We should call this behavior a more proper name, “Wealthism.” Just as racists believe in superiority by division and discrimination, “Wealthists” seek superiority by division and discrimination of wealth creators. There is just one problem; the so called villains being demonized are the very people that enhance and save lives.

Basic economics teaches that wealth is created by the actions of man in altering and adding value to scarce raw materials and resources to make them more useful in meeting demand. This additional value is considered capital, which economist Hernando DeSoto explains originally came from the word “cattle.”

Because cattle have always been important sources of wealth beyond the basic meat they provide. Livestock are low maintenance possessions; they are mobile and can be moved away from danger; they are also easy to count and measure. But most important, from livestock you can obtain additional wealth, or surplus value, by setting in motion other industries, including milk, hides, wool, meat, and fuel. Livestock also have the useful attribute of being able to reproduce them-selves. Thus the term “capital” begins to do two jobs simultaneously, capturing the physical dimensions of assets (livestock) as well as their potential to generate surplus value. From the barnyard it was only a short step to the desks of the inventors of economics, who generally defined “capital as that part of a country’s assets that initiates surplus production and increases productivity

Because we do not live with unlimited abundance like the Garden of Eden, scarcity places value on resources that are directly or indirectly owned based on human demand. When capital in the form of goods and services is exchanged, wealth is created.

Wealth is often defined in terms of a tangible currency. But money only acts as a certificate of performance in meeting the needs and demand of others. Capitalists must first serve before they can earn in a free market of voluntary exchange.

In a market economy, human nature and incentives allow scarce resources to efficiently flow from those who have to those who need. Greater wealth comes from increased economic efficiency in meeting needs while answering the fundamental scarcity question. In turn, wealth creation means more of mans unlimited desires including food, clothing, shelter, and medical care, are being met. As a beautiful result, the standard of living rises which equates to a greater quality and quantity of life.

In short, economic growth creates wealth which saves lives. By default then, wealth creation is compassion by action, which is a far cry from the compassionate chest and drum beating coming out of Wall Street and Washington. Proof can be seen in the world wide increase in the standard of living, population, and life expectancy while infant mortality and poverty rates decline.

We can even add a formula to the explanation. If amount of economic growth raises the standard of living Y amount, then Z numbers of people are saved who would have otherwise perished as a result of the previously lower standard of living. In turn, any economic inefficiency that prevents economic growth to Y will cost Z lives.

For example, if for every 1% of growth in GDP the quality of life increased by X amount and Y people were saved, then a government program that restricted growth by 3% would cost the lives of 3Y peoples minus the number of lives saved by the program. In mathematical terms, if $50 million equals 1% GDP growth and for every 1% increase in GDP 500 lives are saved, then a program that costs $100 million would in effect take the lives of 1000 people minus the number of lives the program saved. If the program saves 1001 people it would be worthwhile, if it saves 999, it is inefficient and in fact would indirectly cause the death of one life.

Thomas Sowell explains this concept in more eloquent terms:

There have been various calculations of how much of a rise in national income saves how many lives. Whatever the correct figure - X million dollars to save one life - anything that prevents national income from rising that much has, in effect, cost a life. If some particular safety law, policy, or device costs 5X million dollars, either directly or in its inhibiting effect on economic growth, than it can no longer be said to be worth it “if it saves just one human life” because it does so at the cost of 5 other human lives. There is no escaping trade-offs, so long as resources are scarce and have alternative uses.

Thus anything that inhibits the market economy from operating freely costs potential economic growth which means the economy does not expand as much as it could have. As a result needs go unmet and more perish than would have otherwise if the market had been freer. In other words, “smaller pie and people die.”

Wealth creation is fostered by property rights, the rule of law, and limited government in the free market. Crony capitalism, where government picks winners and losers abuses these fundamental tenets. Class warfare politicians, who feel entitled to make economic decisions for others, cover their tracks and protect themselves politically by stirring up protestors to deflect attention away from their social engineering.

Those who impugn wealth creation are championing a cause whose end result will be greater human suffering and death. “Wealthism” is either ignorant economics or the vicious side of human nature masquerading as compassion. If class warfare politicians divide and discriminate, while protestors shut down commerce and demand the end to the efficiencies inherent in a system that save lives, the “Wealthists” need to understand, it is they who will have blood on their hands.

Wealthism

2011-11-03T12:02:00.009-04:00

The Occupy Wall Street movement and the class warfare taking place in America is no better than racism. We should all call it by its proper name, Wealthism.

Teachers union supports protest from their Wall Street windows.

2011-10-25T11:04:00.006-04:00

By Dean Kalahar

Since the United Federation of Teachers is working directly with the Occupy Wall Street protestors, I wonder if the OWS folks know that the UFT is located at 50 and 52 Broadway, which is in the heart of Wall Street? The AFT is not operating a store front; we are talking 20+ story buildings in the heart of NY’s financial district.

Either the hypocrisy from both the teachers union and Occupy Wall Street crowd is stunning or their ignorance is overwhelming. Let’s look deeper into the pockets of the self proclaimed “victims” in the crowd to see where “greed” really resides.

Mike Antonucci of the EIA reports an article from The New York Times, September 15, 2002.

At the start of this year, the union (AFT) paid $53.75 million for the
340,000-square-foot mostly occupied building at 50 Broadway, near Exchange
Place, and net leased the adjacent and recently empty 400,000-square-foot
building at 52 Broadway. The union will lease at 52 Broadway, where it also
secured a minority equity position in the building, for 32 years with two
20-year renewal options…

The union alone will relocate 400 employees. Based on incentives
currently being offered to employers that move jobs downtown, the union expects
to receive $3,500 per employee, or a total of $1.4 million.

Three affiliated union groups that have been tenants in the Midtown
South buildings -- the New York State United Teachers, a statewide teachers'
union; the New York State A.F.L.-C.I.O.; and the U.F.T. Welfare Fund -- will
also move to the two Broadway buildings, where they will be subletting space
from the union…

In all, the union is giving up the 310,000 square feet it owned in
Midtown South for 740,000 square feet in the downtown buildings, which will
undergo a $40 million renovation, beginning in February. The work will include
joining the buildings at certain floors and providing such long-sought amenities
as a 1,000-seat auditorium, a 20,000-square-foot conference center, high-tech
wiring and a cafeteria as well as on-site parking for 40 cars. There will also
be a separate entrance and lobby for the union and its members at 52 Broadway,
where most of the new amenities will be housed…

The terms of the lease also included some $20 million in free rent,
work allowance and improvements -- from building out the auditorium and garage
to upgrading the technology -- that the landlord will provide.

Leo Casey of Edwise writes:

UFT President Mulgrew has been at Zuccotti Park a number of times, speaking
to the assembly, and was joined by AFT President Weingarten on one occasion. Our
headquarters are a few blocks away from Zuccotti, and we have provided space for
meetings of different groups supporting OWS. We have also given over a major
section of our street level space to storage for OWS, for donations of materials
and supplies sent to them and for the stowing of personal belongings on the
morning when Bloomberg threatened to “cleanse” Zuccotti…

Oh, and last weekend, we sent forty sandwiches left from our conference
for charter school educators over to Zuccotti. I had not thought much of that
donation until Fox Business Network senior correspondent Charles Gasparino
called the UFT on Monday… Why, he demanded to know, was the UFT providing
sustenance to violent revolutionaries? Confronted with the results of
Gasparino’s crackerjack investigative reporting, I decided that it is time to
confess. Yes, I authorized that sandwich smuggling operation.

To further support the hypocrisy, the EIA also uncovered how the UFT is boosting the performance (profits) of Goldman Sachs’ commercial mortgage portfolio of pass-through certificates. The statement notes the positive performance of the underlying collateral pool most notably because:

The largest loan of the pool (10.1%) is secured by a 399,935 square
feet (SF) class B office property in the Financial District submarket
of Manhattan, NY. The property is 100% occupied by the United Federation
of Teachers (UFT) under a long-term lease which expires in August 2034.
UFT also holds 9.9% ownership interest in the building. The loan
is structured with a letter of credit (LOC) which can be drawn upon
to cover debt service shortfalls.

Up to now, the agenda of the Occupy Wall Street crowd has been hard to pin point. This means either the protestors are in fact a rag tag group of burned out malcontents, or they are being used as proxies of organized labor to do their dirty work. After all, if public labor unions spoke with honesty and clarity, it would expose the naked truth of their agenda, greed for power.

The union game of blaming “wall street greed” is beyond irony; it’s the audacity of contempt! Greed for wealth through the creation of capital is far different than greed for power used to seize the hard earned wealth and property of others.

In a nutshell, OWS is an organized plan to define a false villain and create class warfare among America’s electorate so the President and Democrats can win in 2012 and continue feeding the voracious public sector unions their due.

The ends justify the means for the unions and they will stop at nothing to retain their power. Let’s hope the proxy protestors are not pushed into violence. If they are, I’m sure we will hear how horrified the UFT is as they watch the riots from their cushy digs on Broadway.

Shameful is the only word that comes to mind.

Back to school: What's on the agenda?

2011-10-12T10:41:00.007-04:00

By Dean Kalahar

It is assumed that public schools focus on a simple philosophy, teach kids how to read, write, and add. But data shows chronic academic deficiencies among students. Parents, aware of the systemic ills in public education, think their child’s school is great and that problems happen “someplace else.” This creates a paradox, if the three R’s are supposed to be the guiding principles, is it possible that something else is driving the public school syllabus?

Colleges of Education, the National Education Association, textbook, and curriculum developers embrace a therapeutic ideology broadly called Identity politics. They believe injustice and victimization of members in certain social groups, who have been marginalized by others, are entitled to special treatment. Public schools act as the surrogate host transmitting this view to unsuspecting students who are not immune from its influence.

Traditional principles for learning the basics based on accountability, opportunity, and responsibility, have been replaced with developing a “social consciousness.” Let’s look at what some call education and others indoctrination.

One tenet is Political correctness, or not offending certain gender, racial, cultural, sexual, or religious classes. The county has used an American History textbook that was reviewed as “a propaganda tract.” Its revisionist history and emphasis on the oppression of minorities, women and the poor taught white guilt instead of American Exceptionalism. Competition and valedictorians have been replaced with speech codes and participation awards.

Moral relativism/equivalency, dictates there is no moral truth -natural rights or wrongs- and all value systems are equal so judgments are evil. The county’s 9/11 curriculum says to “challenge them to find the commonalities,” between the 9/11 terrorists and Norway’s recent killer. The IB mission statement suspends reason by stating that students should “understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.”

Social Justice promotes equal outcomes because oppression has caused some people to have more than others. Florida school administers are evaluated on being “advocates for equity and social justice.” The NEA “opposes any immigration policy,” promotes reparations, and believes “efforts to legislate English as the official language ... must be challenged.” Universities write “Mathematics for social justice” curriculum.

Multiculturalism promotes “group-differentiated rights,” where special treatment is required under the ethos of diversity and tolerance. Florida teacher preparation programs demand that teachers believe in “diversity,” and practice “tolerance” before being certified. The schools support “Embracing our Differences,” a campaign that glorifies discriminating in order to end discrimination?

Sexism, Sex Education and family planning promote sexual orientation and gender identification. A Florida Celebrate Freedom Week lesson asks kids to “Write a new Declaration of Sentiments from another view point; e.g., gay rights.” The National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, given –sometimes wrongly- in our schools is a morally questionable set of sexually explicit questions asked to children as young as 11. The NEA wants “the right to reproductive freedom,” “school-based family planning clinics,” and “rehabilitation for the assailant, and the protection of privacy” in sexual assault cases.

Bullying now means a focus on harassment against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. LGBT groups, who influence campus life, promote universal acceptance using the anti-bullying message as a soft form of hate crime legislation on children. The school board has thirteen pages of procedures on bullying.

Globalism and Environmentalism: the NEA says “Allegiance to a nation is the biggest stumbling block to the creation of international government.” The local AICE curriculum is a socialist proxy for “global citizenship,” “schools as global enterprises,” “tolerant democracies,” “marginalized communities,” “optimum population,” and “greater fairness.” The Florida American History exit exam will focus on international justice, US imperialism and domestic terrorism. Sustainability and global warming is religion.

Lastly, gifted education has been co-opted by misusing Multiple Intelligence Theory to define everyone as gifted. This has created a false sense of self esteem and superiority that glorifies egos at the cost to those truly needing services.

If Identity politics is what parents expect, then there is reason to celebrate the success of creating socially conscious kids who can’t read, write, or add. If parents were unaware of the school agenda, then it may be time to inoculate your children from a disease that just might be rotting our schools from within.

.

Social Security: the truth the government does not want you to know

2011-09-19T12:24:00.002-04:00

With a $14.587 trillion dollar national debt, the U. S. is on track for bankruptcy and catastrophic economic pain. Politicians from OZ will say “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” But don’t be fooled by smoke and mirrors.

The largest part of the federal budget is entitlement spending. Since it serves the elderly and the afflicted it has often been called the “third rail” because it is politically “electrified.” Nobody wants to touch entitlements, but basic math now demands that we feel the shock before we all get burned.

Officially known as The Federal Insurance Contribution Act (FICA), Social Security and Medicare were designed based on a corrupt model of purchasing political power not care for the elderly. In the largest scam ever perpetrated upon American taxpayers, politicians have stolen the people’s money and cooked the books.

FICA is automatically deducted from your paycheck and sent to the federal government. Supposedly, this money is to be placed in a “trust fund” and invested so it will grow and provide you with retirement income and health care benefits when you need them most.

The Social Security trust funds are not like a private investment fund or pension that an individual owns and where money is saved, invested, and grows for the rainy day of retirement. Only public insurance can call itself a “trust” and not actually give the taxpayer “security.”

Social security functions when there are a lot of workers paying and just a few people getting benefits. In the early years of the program, the payroll tax dedicated to Social Security produced more money than the government needed to pay in benefits. Today our senior population is growing faster than our working population meaning there are fewer workers supporting more retirees.

FICA is a pay-as-you-go system, meaning that the taxes paid by today's workers are immediately sent out to pay beneficiaries. By law, if Social Security revenues exceed expenditures, the surplus is credited to the trust funds in the form of U.S. government “special issue” non-marketable bonds. These securities are worthless on the open market because IOU’s that can’t be sold are only worth the paper they are printed on.

When the bonds mature, they are rolled over into new bonds that include both the original value and any interest due. In short, the government confiscates the public’s hard earned money, writes an IOU from one branch of government to another, then- and this is important- pays off worthless IOU’s that have interest attached with newer worthless IOU’s so as to make it appear as if the trust fund is solvent. It’s accounting magic!

The real wealth earned from hard working Americans, exchanged for worthless bonds, goes into the general fund of the Treasury where it is spent as fast as it is confiscated by politicians. Sadly, as everyone knows, you cannot spend and save the same money.

In fact, the Social Security trust fund is actually a white metal file cabinet at the Parkersburg offices of the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Public Debt in Martinsburg, WV. When the federal government takes the cash coming into Social Security, it writes the trust fund a bond on a laser printer located at the bureau. It is then stored in a three-ring binder and locked in the bottom drawer of a fireproof filing cabinet.

The entire retirement future of America is in that drawer. One bond is for $15.1 billion and another is just under $10.7 billion. In all, the agency has about $2.5 trillion in bonds sitting in the binder. Of course some will say they are all backed by the “full faith and credit of the U.S. government.” But when political faith is a fraud and our credit is flawed, good luck getting benefits.

The trust fund balances are claims on the Treasury which must finance all redemptions and pay interest payments with real current dollars. In order to repay those IOUs, the government will have to either: raise taxes, borrow the needed funds from private markets, reduce or cut other federal programs, reduce Social Security benefits by increasing the retirement age, link benefits increases to longevity, or lower automatic adjustments to benefits based on inflation.

Today Social Security is collecting more money than it needs to pay benefits. In 2017, Social Security will begin paying out more than it takes in. Thus, the percentage of spending for entitlements in the federal budget will begin to rapidly expand which will force massive cuts in other programs. The trust funds will become fully exhausted by 2041 and overwhelm the budget until the nation is forced to borrow itself into insolvency.

In simple terms the FICA program is a pyramid or Ponzi scheme. In the fraud, people on the top of the pyramid collect as long as they can get others below them to pay in. Now as the baby boom retires, the takers outstrip the payers. And like all Ponzi schemes, this is when the system will collapse like a house of cards and take with it the American economy.

The day of reckoning is here. Not even the all powerful OZ can spend other people’s money, write an IOU to himself, and then on some future day expect to use those IOUs to fund the Emerald City. It’s time to pull back the curtains and admit “the emperor has no clothes.”

The good news is that it’s in everyone’s self-interest; liberals, conservatives, left, right, Democrat and Republican, to stop in the runaway train and de-energize the third rail before it runs us over. All aboard!

The gold bubble

2011-09-19T12:16:00.005-04:00

For the record:

The gold bubble will burst when the inflation pumps are turned on by _____?
With over a trillion dollars sitting on the sidelines
and the FED QE1&2ing and swaping debt terms

The question is not "if," but "when."

Gov't Spending, and the 18% of GDP Myth

2011-06-09T09:47:00.000-04:00

My current article from Real Clear Markets:

Gov't Spending, and the 18% of GDP Myth

The school budget: time for a reality check

2011-06-02T15:00:00.003-04:00

By Dean Kalahar

Listening once again to the yearly cry that “the schools are broke” is beyond tedious and boorish. But what does a school district budget really look like in “Anytown, U.S.A.?” For a point of reference, let’s look at Sarasota, Florida.

In a nutshell, the Sarasota County Schools budget has been rolled back to 2005-06 levels; a time prior to the housing collapse when revenue was strong due to a large property tax base and extra referendum dollars. As far as education quality is concerned, the mediocrity from bureaucracy of 5 years ago was no different than it is today.

The schools spent $372 million in 2005-06 to teach 41,516 students. In 2011-12 they will spend $381 million teaching 483 less students while spending $581 dollars more per student. How this creates cause for alarm or drastic cuts in any program, salary, benefit, or position is anyone’s guess. Nonetheless, the district cries out as if the sky is falling.

Factoring in for inflation (constant dollars), per pupil expenditures have increased $1689 or 18.6% between 2000 and 2011 to its current level of $10,769 per student.

The $381 million dollar budget does not include the $41 million “fund balance,” also known as a school board savings account, or the $340 million capital outlay “construction” budget.

The total budget for next year is only $5 million less than this year’s –a far cry from what the public has been told- which represents a tiny 1.3 % decrease in spending. Lowering the fund balance to $36 million would have made up for the difference.

The political reality is that there are never enough dollars for elite educators who work within a system of utopian absolutes, void of such pesky market realities as profit, loss, competition, innovation, and productivity. Even at the height of the boom (2008) when the system had $485 million general budget dollars, you were told the schools needed more money, more referenda, more of everything! Cynics say they’ve perfected the “crisis for the children” game to hide the fact the system is fat, happy, and always hungry.

When the consistently militant blue collar teachers union folded like a cheap shirt at the bargaining table, it was clear they felt the heat of public sentiment against collective bargaining largess. Better to lay low for a while, seem compassionate, and protect the gravy train for the long haul.

The bottom line is that there is no budget crisis, the school system has plenty of revenue, and there will be no noticeable changes or effective reforms. The business as usual “shell game” continues. Unfortunately, the consumers of education keep losing while the public sector monolith keeps laughing all the way to the bank.

Source: Sarasota County budget spreadsheets

Florida high school exit exams indoctrinate children into a progressive and revisionist model critical of America

2011-05-13T16:04:00.002-04:00

By Dean Kalahar
May 13, 2011

Florida is currently moving forward with the creation and implementation of exit tests in the public schools. This is an important reform effort and Florida should be applauded. In a turn that can only be called outrageous however, the process for developing these tests has been hijacked. In teaching American history, the exit exam process is being used as a legal tool for student indoctrination into a progressive and revisionist model that is critical of America.

While exit exams are a vital tool in evaluating student knowledge acquisition, they force very specific aspects of curriculum into being taught as accurate and factual. Teachers, who will now be evaluated and paid according to the exit exam’s specific details and student performance therein, are all but forced into teaching children “what to think.”

This is not a problem in subjects like math for concepts like addition and subtraction. But in the social sciences, suspect concepts and interpretations of history can be used as a tool for distorting the facts at best or indoctrination of children at worst. In subjects like economics, distortions of fundamental theories can cause inefficiencies and death, so important education decisions like what to place in exit exams should not be taken lightly.

The new Florida exit exam standards are a shocking move toward what one can only equate to soviet style propaganda to create a monolithic citizenry. In the case of high school American history, a look into the specifics of the exit exam is all that is needed as proof to an agenda directed in a planned process by groups that have no problem using whatever means necessary to acquire power and promote a twisted vision of America. Florida exit exams in the social sciences need to be stopped immediately and there needs to be a serious reconsideration of the entire process before moving ahead.

As they say, the devil is in the details. The following exit exam specifics are copied directly from the Florida DOE website. Just a few of the concerning aspects that teachers will be legally bound to teach are listed here. As you will see, there are real issues with the appropriateness and accuracy of the Florida exit exam program.

What is stunning is that the 9 standards that follow are a part of the 88 fundamentals of American history that will be tested. As you read what has been determined as mastery based American history, ask yourself, are these fundamental, factual, unbiased, politically correct, or indoctrinating?

•Describe the attempts to promote international justice
•Analyze the major factors that drove United States imperialism
•Analyze the effects of domestic terrorism on the American people.
•Examine the controversy surrounding the proliferation of nuclear technology in the United States
•Assess key figures and organizations in shaping the Black Power Movement.
•Analyze significant Supreme Court decisions relating to reproductive rights.
•Describe efforts by the United States and other world powers to avoid future wars
•Examine the failure of the United States to support the League of Nations
•Discuss the economic outcomes of demobilization.

Underline and bold added to highlight the concern.
Source: fcat.fldoe.org/eoc/pdf/HistoryAppendixB.pdf

The fundamental federal budget question is: how much is enough?

2011-03-31T15:25:00.003-04:00

Since history is a measuring stick the answer is simple math.

From the founding of our nation,1787-1849 (63 years) federal spending averaged 1.7% of GDP. For the next 51 years, 1850-1900 (including fighting the Civil War) it averaged only 3.1%. From 1901 till 1930 (including fighting WWI) it never reached 8% and averaged approximately 3.2%. Even at the height of the progressive movement and FDR’s New Deal, federal spending as a percentage of GDP never went above the 1934 level of 10.7%. For the first 100+ years of America’s existence, the government provided its Constitutional duties with 2.3% of GDP on average.

Today the federal government is spending is approximately 40% of GDP and that number is rising.

Now that we all now know the truth, we all know what needs to be done.

The untold story inside Social Security:

2011-03-22T12:05:00.002-04:00

The facts the government does not want you to know.

By Dean Kalahar

March 22, 2011

With a 14 trillion dollar national debt and national bankruptcy looming, the United State is facing some sober budget realities. To solve the problem, Congress and the President will be forced to address spending in the largest part of the federal budget made up of what are known as entitlements. These are government programs that are supposed to serve the elderly and the afflicted. Addressing entitlements is made difficult because the programs were designed based on a flawed and some might say corrupt model that had more to do with purchasing political power than care for the elderly. In the largest scam ever perpetrated upon the American taxpayer, politicians sold the program to the public with smoke and mirrors, stole the taxpayer’s money, and then cooked the books. Plain and simply Social Security is a fraud. It will bankrupt America destroying our economy and way of life if it is not reformed.

Now, you will hear many say that social security is fine and call anyone who questions it an alarmist or is in favor of killing grandma. You be the judge of the reality you are about to learn. This is the true untold inside story of Social Security with the facts the government does not want you to know.

Social Security began as The Federal Insurance Contribution Act (FICA). It is the public insurance program set up under FDR’s “New Deal” as retirement income insurance called Social Security and later, under LBJ, for health needs called Medicare. For anyone who receives a paycheck, FICA is automatically deducted from your gross earnings and sent to the federal government. Supposedly, this money is to be placed in a “trust fund” and invested so it will grow and provide you with retirement income and health care benefits when you are old. Sadly, the Social Security Trust Fund was never secured with the dollars invested in order to allow them to grow as found in private insurance. Only public insurance can call its behavior a “trust” and not actually give the taxpayer peace of mind in actually trusting the investment to be there when they need it most.

Social Security is not like a savings account in which payroll taxes are saved for retirement. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, meaning that the taxes paid by today's workers are immediately sent out to pay the benefits of today's retirees. The other big difference between privatized pensions and Social Security is that the individual owns the pension he has paid for. This is not, as you will be told, simply a theoretical distinction to ignore, it is a fundamental practical difference. Personal ownership of one’s self and property defines morality and is a natural God given right. For example, rape, theft, murder, and assault are a direct infringement on a person’s property. As such, the taking of property in the form of FICA without property right protection is immoral. FICA may also be seen as unconstitutional because government has taken the property of citizens, and used it as their own, without providing the citizens the constitutional protections afforded under the 5th Amendment which states: nor (shall any person) be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

The problem with the Social security system is that it only functions when there are a lot of workers paying payroll taxes and just a few retired people getting benefits. Our senior population is growing much faster than our working population however. This means there are fewer and fewer workers supporting more and more retirees. In the early years of the program, the payroll tax dedicated to Social Security produced more money than the government needed to pay in benefits. By law, if Social Security revenues exceed expenditures, the “surplus” is credited to the Social Security trust funds in the form of U.S. government securities. The “fungible” cash exchanged for the securities goes into the general fund of the Treasury and is indistinguishable from other cash in the general fund. In short, the extra revenue is spent by Congress and the Social Security trust fund is credited with “special issue,” non-marketable, U.S. government bonds or worthless pieces of paper that act as only a clever accounting entry. The irony is that bonds are also called “securities,” but there is no security provided to taxpayers no matter what they call the entitlement.

The taxpayer’s cash from payroll deductions (FICA) is used to pay for whatever other expenses or deficits the government may have at the time. The government does not save our Social Security taxes for future retirees. There is no separate pool of money set aside for Social Security purposes. Simply stated, Money for your future is spent today, and as everyone knows, you cannot spend and save the same money, no matter what accounting gimmicks you use.

In simple terms the FICA program is a pyramid or Ponzi scheme like the one Bernie Madoff used to scam his clients. In the fraud, people on the top of the pyramid collect as long as they can get others below them to pay in. For Social Security, early beneficiaries were being paid by workers not yet ready to retire. As a result, the scheme looks to actually work as some are receiving benefits and can truthfully say “it works.” Unfortunately now as the baby boom retires, the takers outstrip the payers. Like all Ponzi schemes this is when it will collapse like a house of cards. Except this time the house is the U.S. government and the American economy.

Like the famous Saturday Night Live parody of Vice President Al Gore’s Social Security “lock box,” the misnamed Social Security Trust Fund has no resemblance to a private investment fund where there is actual capital or money saved, invested and increasing in size for the rainy day of retirement. In fact, the Social Security trust fund is actually a white metal file cabinet at the Parkersburg offices of the Bureau of the Public Debt's Martinsburg, WV office. The agency, which is part of the Treasury Department, opened offices in Parkersburg in the 1950s.

When the federal government takes the cash coming into the Social Security fund from payroll taxes to spend on other things, it writes the trust fund a bond. When a new bond is issued, it is printed on a laser printer located at the bureau and then carried across the room, stored in a three-ring binder, and then locked in the bottom drawer of a fireproof filing cabinet. That filing cabinet is the Social Security trust fund. Until relatively recently, these bonds only existed as entries in a record book. Today it has been said they actually have the records on computer.

The entire retirement future of America is in that drawer. One bond is worth a little more than $15.1 billion and another is valued at just under $10.7 billion. In all, the agency has about $2.5 trillion in bonds sitting in the 3 ring binder. Of course some will say they are all backed by the “full faith and credit of the U.S. government.” Don't bother trying to steal them, however, they're nonnegotiable, which means they are worthless on the open market. After all, common sense tells you that if you spend the money coming in and replace it with IOU’s that can’t be sold, then the bonds are not worth the paper they are printed on.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) explained in its fiscal year 2000 budget document that the Social Security "trust funds" do not contain stocks, bonds, or other assets that could be sold directly for cash. The OMB also noted, “the annual surpluses that many thought were being used to build up a reserve for the “baby boomers” have been spent on other government programs or to reduce government debt.”

The Old Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund (OASI) and the Disability Insurance Trust Fund (DI) make up the Social Security trust funds. Since the beginning of the Social Security program, all securities held by the trust funds have been issued by the Federal Government. The funds hold a specific type of securities called “Special issues.” These are only available only to the trust funds. Although the trust funds have held public issues in the past, the trust funds currently hold special issues only. When the bonds mature, they are rolled over into new bonds that include both the original issue amount and any interest due. The new bonds pay whatever interest as regular Treasury bonds of the same maturity issued on that date. These bonds are really nothing more than IOUs from one branch of government to another. They are not a real financial asset. In other words, the government confiscates the public’s hard earned money, writes an IOU, then- and this is important- pays off worthless IOU’s that have interest attached with newer worthless IOU’s so as to make it appear as if the trust fund is solvent.

The trust fund balances are available to finance future benefit payments and other trust fund expenditures, but only in a bookkeeping sense. They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be paid for with real dollars. Neither the redemption of trust fund bonds, nor interest paid on those bonds, provides any new net income to the Treasury, which must finance all redemptions and pay interest payments.

In order to repay those IOUs, the government will have to either : raise taxes, borrow the needed funds from private markets, reduce or cut other federal programs, or reduce Social Security benefits by increasing the retirement age, link benefits increases to longevity, or lower automatic adjustments to benefits based on inflation. Even the President said in the 2011 federal budget: “The existence of large trust fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, increase the government’s ability to pay benefits.”

The trust fund bonds may be assets from the point of view of Social Security, but they’re a liability for the government as a whole, and for taxpayers. The problem, of course, is that the government now owes the trust fund so much money and relies on its surplus so heavily that real problems will be created when it comes time to cash in those IOUs.

Social Security does not have borrowing authority, so when it exhausts the trust funds, the program will only pay out in benefits what it receives in tax revenue. That’s different from bankruptcy, which would imply that the program cannot pay benefits anymore. What that means is that Social Security can get what it needs from Treasury without having to ask permission from Congress and continue the Ponzi scheme indefinitely. At least until the entitlement program takes up so much of the federal budget that the nation is forced to borrow itself into bankruptcy.

Of the $13.5 trillion in gross federal debt, Social Security holds $2.5 trillion of the total $4.54 trillion in government-held debt. The net interest net interest owed by Social Security is $118.3 billion. An additional there is $2 trillion in debt from other government obligations that will impact necessary budgetary reforms. Cleverly, the securities held by the Social Security system are not counted as part of the national debt, because it is one government agency owing money to another. Here we see the magic act that is Social Security. Set up an accounting scheme where one agency owes another agency but no actual currency balances the books and you have the ability to claim vast wealth while not having two nickels to rub together. It’s a sleight of hand diabolical scam.

Today Social Security is collecting more money than it needs to pay benefits, but by 2018 it will begin running a deficit. The last 5 Trustees Reports have indicated that Social Security's Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds would become exhausted between 2037 and 2041. In 2017, Social Security will begin paying out more than it takes in. For the first time, it will have to use the interest being paid on the securities it holds in order to meet its obligations. Thus, the percentage of spending for entitlements in the federal budget will begin to rapidly expand. This will force massive cuts in other programs. In 2027, Social Security would have to start redeeming the securities themselves. By 2041, Social Security would have cashed in the last security, and the system would have enough revenue to pay out only 75% of promised benefits and would drop over time.

Government “special interest” bonds are not an investment that adds one cent to the country's wealth. The real wealth in the form of the FICA taxes earned through the hard work of the American people is spent as fast as it is confiscated. As you can see the $2.54 trillion Social Security trust fund is really an empty bucket. It is a claim on future taxpayers so you know who will be paying the bill, American citizens.

Like a foolish parent who builds a college fund built solely on the good intentions of “I was going to save,” the day of reckoning comes when tuition is due. Likewise, the feds have written checks to themselves that they can’t cash, and the day of reckoning is here. Not even the all powerful OZ can spend other people’s money, write an IOU to himself, and then on some future day expect to use those IOUs to fund the Emerald City. It’s time to pull back the curtains and expose the naked emperor’s smoke and mirrors.

Social Security is a broken fraud. The sooner we admit it and deal with it, the sooner we can hope to stop the bankruptcy of the nation. The positive reality is that for the first time solving the problem is in everyone’s self-interest. Liberals, conservatives, left, right, Democrat and Republican all have a vested self interest in promoting change. Because if we do not attack the “third rail” of American politics, we all but guarantee that any money for individual “special interests” will be eaten up by Social Security. If we don’t rein in the monster, it will indiscriminately eat all of us.

Sources:

Allan Sloan, Washington post

Columbus Dispatch

Dawn Nuschler, Social Security: Trust Fund Investment Practices

Dean Kalahar, Practical Economics

Eric Schurenberg, Fiscal Times

E. Thomas McClanahan, Kansas City Star

FY 2000 Budget, Analytical Perspectives

Heritage foundation

Liz Pulliam Weston, 5 myths about social security

Thomas Sowell, Social Insecurity; Something for Nothing: Social Security; What Trust Fund?

Social Security.gov

U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Economics lesson: mother nature or man?

2011-03-18T12:20:00.001-04:00

Lets first agree on 2 premises: natural disasters occur, and humans interacts with the earth.

With that said:

The natural disaster tsunami in Japan was made up of 100 trillion gallons of water and took less than an hour to create its destruction.

The man-made “disaster” of world oil consumption is made up of 140 million gallons an hour.

That means that the “destructive” nature of oil consumption is only 14 millionths of one percent as destructive as the tsunami on a per gallon basis.

Conclusions: the extreme environmental dogma that believes man is responsible for destroying the earth is not even of discussable statistical significance.

As such, it would be prudent to stop the absurd belief that Americans should stop drilling for oil and produce “renewable green energy” to “save” the planet.

The belief that man has the power to impact much of anything in a global sense can only be categorized as an arrogant attempt to inflate the human condition by those who are incapable of humility or basic math.

It’s time to produce our own domestic oil supply and become energy independent to mitigate the security threat we face in regards to foreign oil dependence.

Dean Kalahar

Why Schools Keep Failing

2011-01-28T16:11:00.005-05:00

Educators have created the very culture that has severely damaged the ability to educate children

By Dean Kalahar

It’s not a headline anymore to say that the public school system needs to do a better job educating our children. The good news is there are successful education reforms based on fundamental principles of human nature and learning that are just waiting to be utilized.

Unfortunately, the monolithic public school cartel constantly tells the public it is implementing the panacea for the ills of public schooling. Yet, the constant reforms and programs offered over the last two decades have proven to be ineffective. One has to wonder, if educators are working so hard on fixing the schools, why have the problems in our schools become progressively worse?

The reason is simple. The “feel good” public school ideology built in the 1960’s continues to drive school pedagogy. School “experts” simply repackage the same old inefficient programs using the same faulty education model. Now, after 50 years of undermining the social fabric of our nation, educators have created the very culture that makes educating children so difficult.

The progressive education model has created a self fulfilling prophesy of geometrically increasing systemic failure. To paraphrase Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, schools have been the catalyst for “defining deviancy downward.” In short, the more liberal educators push their worldview in schools, the more the culture corrodes, and the harder it is to teach kids who grow up in a dysfunctional world.

Until the addicts of progressive education admit they have a problem, they will continue to create at best, self-centered illiterates who feel entitled. At worst, they will all but destroy a great nation. Educators need a reality check of self-awareness to overcome their dissonance.

What has progressive education policy created in our culture and schools?

Children of single mothers — particularly teen mothers — suffer disproportionately high poverty rates, impaired development and low school performance.
In 2009, 41% of children born in the USA were born to unmarried mothers (up from 5% a half-century ago). That includes 73% of non-Hispanic black children, 53% of Hispanic children and 29% of non-Hispanic white children.
One-third of children are overweight or obese.
75% of students are in such a poor state that they are ineligible for military service for reasons ranging from health to drugs to criminal records to lack of education, while 23% of those who try to enlist fail the basic entrance exam.
In a large majority of never-married mothers, by the time a child is 5, most of the fathers are gone and the child has little contact with him. Many of the mothers go on to new relationships, where the children are hampered by repeated transitions that harm their development.
In 2009, for the first time since the Census began tallying marriages, the proportion of never-married Americans ages 25 through 34 exceeded those who had been married.
Eight reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 have failed to improve achievement or graduation rates.
Our government spends more per capita on education than any other of the 34 wealthiest countries in the world except for Switzerland. Inflation-adjusted K-12 spending has tripled over the past 40 years.
American test scores and graduation rates are stagnant, and nearly a third drop out or can't finish high school in four years. One in 10 high schools is a “dropout factory.” Students’ performance in one of the most prestigious global math competitions has been so abysmal that the U.S. simply withdrew altogether.

Despite these statistics, the connection to progressive education policies and their toxic cultural manifestations go unseen. Today, the same 60’s “Edu-crats” continue to demand power and control over the methodology that guides education. They are blind to the realization that if you use the same recipe you will get the same distasteful results.

Repeating the principles that produce failure is the epitome of insanity. The irony is, the insanity is coming from self anointed “education experts.”

Public school reform is not a difficult “chicken or the egg” question. Progressive schooling created the toxic culture that now inhibits school success. American education needs to go back to the principles of classical economic and political theory for answers. Our schools need a counter-intuitive model that, like capitalism, works better than it sounds instead of continuing with a progressive model that sounds better than it works.

Sources:
Lindsey Burke, Heritage Foundation
Editorial, USA Today
Michelle Malkin, National Review
George Will, Washington Post

To raise or not to raise, that is the question?

2011-01-21T15:57:00.001-05:00

By Dean Kalahar

Should the U.S. debt ceiling be raised? We are being told by the experts in Washington that we have to raise the debt ceiling or disaster will occur to the economy. Is this true? The answer can be found in a simple economic comparison.

Consider a family that has a credit card and must budget their revenue and expenses.

Every month they pay off some of the principle and interest on their credit card, but keep using the card and thus add up higher and higher debt balances. They are not living within a balanced budget so they are running both a monthly budget deficit and increasing the overall family debt.

Over time, because of a slowing in family revenue and/or an increase in family expenditures, the ability to pay toward the principle credit card balance as well as the interest is becoming more difficult. More of the budget each month goes in paying off just the credit card interest.

As the overall debt builds and it becomes too difficult to pay anything towards the principle, they begin paying only the monthly interest payment on the card and keep racking up additional charges.

No one seems to mind this arrangement as the credit card company is making its profits through interest and the family seems to be able to make ends meet without having to make any tough choices. Everyone is happy for now.

Over time the monthly interest charges alone become very large and become a burden on the family budget because they are cutting into much of the other necessities the mother and father are supposed to provide, or have “given” as extras, to the children.

This is causing pain and personal hardship. In fact the elders are getting an earful of unhappiness from the young folk in the family.

To make matters worse, they have reached their credit limit on the card with the bank.

They are faced with a choice.

Ask for more credit to be given by upping the credit card limit, or figure out how to pay off their credit card debt while at the same time providing for the families needs.

Some would argue that if they don’t ask for a raise in their credit limit the family faces psychological embarrassment because the bank might “see them” as an increasing risky client to loan money to and lower their credit rating. The family might have to also shoulder the psychological burden of having less than “the full faith” of the bank. Even the neighbors might notice that the family doesn’t seem to be as “powerful” as before.

Others argue that the family might have their interest rate go up on current balances that are not paid, thus creating additional hardships and strains on the budget.

Some would simply say the family has to get the bank to raise the limit because there is no other way in which to keep the family “running” as usual. After all, some members of the family might get upset with a change in their lifestyle.

If the family does ask the credit card company to raise their credit limit and increase the amount of debt they will have an increase in the monthly minimum interest payment on the card.

In the short run, this will buy the family some time and allow them to behave “as normal” looking as if the family’s financial house is in order.

Of course, in the long term the family will have borrowed so much that they will not even be able to afford paying even the minimum monthly interest payment as well as the other necessities the family needs to provide. When that happens, and the family misses enough interest payments, the bank will either no longer extend them additional credit, or offer credit at a higher interest rate.

The higher rate will be due to the family’s greater credit risk, but credit will be offered to hopefully keep the family from going bankrupt and totally stop paying off their loans which would be bad for the credit card lender as well as those who invested in the lender.

In other words, the so called “experts” say: increase the family debt in order to pay the family debt so the family does not go bankrupt and stop paying its debts. Basic math tells us that this is an unsustainable equation.

In the worst case scenario, the family would default on the loan and declare bankruptcy. This will lead to pain and suffering of current as well as future generations of the family.

Additionally, this would leave the bank holding an IOU from the family that was itself worthless, and if enough defaults occurred within a bank, the bank itself could go bankrupt.

As the banking system is intertwined, the collapse of the entire system could be a possibility.

Raising the debt limit is like giving a crack addict just a little more “rock” while telling him to quit. The longer you wait to allow them to reach bottom, the bigger the problem and the more severe the danger.

What if the family does not ask for more credit and decides to not ask for a rise in their credit limit?

They would have to stop spending more than they earned and thus end the borrowing of money on credit.

The family would have to “make due” with less and show fiscal responsibility and restraint to create a budget that took care of the most pressing family needs while paying off the credit card debt in good faith.

The family could accomplish this by acting economically. They would cut back on spending in areas, increase revenue coming into the home in by working longer, harder and more efficiently. In addition, the family could be freed of outside burdens that impinge on working.

In short, the family could tighten their belts and pay the monthly interest and as much of the principle balance until the card was paid off while meeting their other obligations to the best of their ability by prioritizing spending.

This would cause upset and unrest among family members in the short run, but the long term health of the family would be secured

In taking this approach, the family would be seen as trustworthy, creditworthy, efficient and self sufficient. Their credit rating would be AAA and they would become a role model for other families to emulate. Faith in the family’s fiscal house would be unquestioned and if the family ever did need a loan in an emergency, they would have no trouble securing a loan as others would have “full faith” that the credit extended was backed by a history of creditworthiness and principled behavior.

Should we raise the debt ceiling? It is an easy decision.

The government believes it make sense to pay off old debt by securing more new debt, while at the same time spend more than you have and acquire even more new debt. Why? Because the benefits of spending today are immediate, while the costs are not paid until long after the politicians are out of office and have left behind a bill to be paid by the next generation of yet to be named Americans. It’s the perfect political scam, and it will bankrupt the nation. It’s only a matter of time, unless all Americans take a stand and say “no more.” Raising the debt ceiling will actually create the problems the “experts” are telling you we will avoid if we raise the ceiling.

Remember: If you are not going to borrow above your credit limit, there is no need to ask for the credit limit to be raised. And if you don’t ask for it to be raised it does not have to mean anything negative, in fact, it may signal nothing but positive responsible economic behaviors.

Do you know they are asking your children about sexual intercourse?

2010-12-15T12:26:00.001-05:00

Youth Risk Survey is putting your children at risk

By Dean Kalahar

The Federal Government, through The Center for Disease Control (CDC), is once again conducting its national Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). States, through their county school systems, administer the test to children in grades 6, 8, 9 and 11 to collect data on youth behaviors. “The purpose of the YRBS is to monitor priority health-risk behaviors that contribute substantially to the leading causes of death, disability, and social problems among youth, which contribute to patterns in adulthood.” Stop and think to yourself: have you ever heard of this survey taking place in your child’s school? Do you know what is in the survey?

The compassionate intentions of the program are potentially useful, but for all purposes, the program is abusive. The reasons for concern are twofold. First, the survey is not a generic data collection event for caring school officials. It is a highly provocative and morally questionable set of questions being asked to our most vulnerable population, children as young as 11 years old. You can judge for yourself with a sample of the following questions from this year’s 99 question YRBS.

-Have you ever had sexual intercourse?
-Have you ever had oral sex?
-How old were you when you had sexual intercourse for the first time?
-Have you ever been physically forced to have sexual intercourse when you did not want to?
-During your life, with how many people have you had sexual intercourse?
-During the past 3 months, with how many people did you have sexual intercourse?
-The last time you had sexual intercourse, did you or your partner use a condom?
-How many times have you been pregnant or gotten someone pregnant?
-During the past 12 months, did you make a plan about how you would attempt suicide?
-During the past 12 months, how many times did you actually attempt suicide?

Secondly, the subject matter alerts any sensible adult that highly specific administration guidelines must occur to protect parental rights and be in compliance with the Family Privacy Protection Act (FPPA) and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Although there are clear rules to follow when conducting surveys with minors, so as not to violate laws in regards to parental consent and confidentiality, these safeguards to family and children’s rights are not being taken.

In fact, the CDC website states that “Local parental permission procedures are followed prior to administration of a YRBS.” In addition, the CDC states “Parental permission was obtained for students to participate in the survey. Student participation was voluntary, and responses were anonymous.” Regrettably, these statements are pure fantasy. The fact is, close monitoring of parental permission is not happening and the test is being administered with little regard to children’s rights. Because of this negligence, the situation has to be exposed.

It is easy to witness or experience the abuses first hand working as a public school teacher. Problems include ignoring signed parental non-consent forms, not alerting parents of the survey by letter, not giving instructions to students taking the survey, and legally questionable opt-out procedures offered to parents. Additionally, there is no oversight or consideration of the ramifications the questioning has to a student’s emotional or psychological stability after the survey.

Processes are clear on how to obtain parental approval through active or passive parental consent laws. Again, according to the CDC, “Most states employ passive parental consent when administering such surveys. Under this system, written notice is sent out to parents informing them of the upcoming survey and the types of questions it will ask, and then permission to participate is assumed unless parents or students indicate otherwise. With passive parental consent all students and parents can decline to participate at any point in the process.”

Again, the CDC can tell the public whatever it wants, but it is up to the individual school districts, schools, and classroom teachers to follow the specific rules through “written instructions” to effectively administer the survey and provide safeguards against surveying a student whose parents had not given their consent. Vigilance, ethics, professional, and legal requirements obligates anyone involved in administering the survey to protect individual freedom. Inexcusably, bureaucratic apathy all but negates this from happening.

Even with all of these specific rules and regulations, laws are being ignored? As such, targeted legislation needs to be passed addressing the lack of seriousness in following the law. Stiff penalties in the form of fines or jail time should be legislated to create the incentives to once and for all end the blatant disregard for the role families have in raising children as parents see fit.

Potential legal actions against the misadministration of the YRBS are justified. They would be an expensive and embarrassing wake up call to survey advocates. Parents, government officials and school leaders must now take action on this issue. The YRBS should be stopped until such time as all parties can be assured the laws that govern the administration of surveys to children will be done with the utmost of respect for the process and protection of individual rights.

Any response less than a full scale investigation will signal only one conclusion; the government wants to know if your child has “had sexual intercourse,” and they are not interested in such pesky things as laws, ethics, mothers or fathers.

“Please define me Facebook, I need you to be whole.”

2010-12-06T15:24:00.002-05:00

By Dean Kalahar

Not so long ago, teenagers learned the hard realities of life, face to face, while they were busy hitting the books. This process was a predictable and stable series of life events, challenges, and personal achievements that guided them to adulthood. In fact, Eric Erickson, a pioneer in psychology, detailed why this interaction and group dynamic is important in the maturation process of teens. First, group interaction allows teens to feel acceptance, fit in, and find a temporary identity. Secondly, the group acts as a manageable measuring stick for a teen to psychologically compare and contract their unique temperaments, values, and principles. This interplay eventually solidifies into a unique sense of self where individual acceptance occurs. In short, the process allows a teen to grow up.

Today, however, technology such as Facebook has unknowingly removed the fundamental aspect of personal interaction and juvenile maturation. The devastating cost of this cyber-disease that ravages the minds of our most vulnerable citizens needs to be understood and evaluated.

Facebook, the social networking site that has become a primary link for many aspects of commerce and communication is robbing our youth the ability to answer the most important question of the maturation process, “who am I.” As a result, children are reaching adult age without undergoing the orderly and sequential experiences and associated cognitive growth necessary to become adults. The result is a generation who are immature, confused, self absorbed, and incapable of handling rejection, disappointment, challenges, and reasoned thought.

Facebook creates a lifestyle of empty friends, phony group dynamics and self-promotion that inhibits the behavioral interactions necessary for personal growth. Today’s teens do not learn about life, face to face, they covertly create a cyber identity where they hide from themselves and the realities of growing up, while believing they are becoming mature and ready to face life’s challenges. The group dynamics created by Facebook is an ironic mirage that has nothing to do with true social interaction or networking.

Teens using Facebook are forced into an unmanageable and unpredictable maturation process based in a cyber reality where the dominant need is to “fit in.” This is done following a software model of being “friended,” updating ones “status,” and obsessively self-promoting and visually glorifying every trivial second of one’s empty existence. Maturation with Facebook is an unstable series of cyber interactions, cyber attacks, and worthless cyber achievements that create psychological confusion and hold hostage a child’s ability to grow and mature.

In a seemingly safe attempt to build a persona and ultimately accept one’s self, kids are actually placing themselves in an experience that does just the opposite. Facebook offers the non-adult mind severe identity confusion, moral relativity, anger, and depression- just to name a few potential maladies. Our children are not becoming productive self reliant adults, they are becoming slaves to a false world of human interaction and surface noise where everyone is connected, everyone communicates, yet nobody speaks. The result, psychologically stunted adults.

Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard has been portrayed as a social outcast in his youth. What began as an alternate reality to replace genuine interaction for Zuckerberg was turned into a multi-billion dollar practical joke as if to say, “If I had to suffer, so will the rest of you.” In Facebook, we truly have the Revenge of the Nerds.

We are losing our traditional system of self acceptance through personal growth and replacing it with a dangerous computer application that transcends the guidance of the family and tangible friends. In the end, adult children who are empty, confused, and lost can thank Facebook for their inability to face the world. How do we know Facebook is becoming a surrogate to accepting self? Half of the 500 million users log in every single day. “Please define me Facebook, I need you to be whole.”

Questions and answers to the news of the week. 11/30/10

2010-11-30T10:53:00.001-05:00

DOES FEDERAL SPENDING WORK?

Using standard statistical analyses that introduce variables to control for business-cycle fluctuations, wars and inflation, we found that over the entire post World War II era through 2009 each dollar of new tax revenue was associated with $1.17 of new spending. Politicians spend the money as fast as it comes in—and a little bit more. We also looked at different time periods (e.g., 1947-2009 vs. 1959-2009), different financial data (fiscal year federal budget data, as well as calendar year National Income and Product Account data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis), different lag structures (e.g., relating taxes one year to spending change the following year to allow for the time it takes bureaucracies to spend money), different control variables, etc. The alternative models produce different estimates of the tax-spend relationship—between $1.05 and $1.81. But no matter how we configured the data and no matter what variables we examined, higher tax collections never resulted in less spending. - Steven Moore

WHY LIBERALS ARE SAD PEOPLE

Utopians will always be less happy than those who know that suffering is inherent to human existence. The utopian compares America to utopia and finds it terribly wanting. The conservative compares America to every other civilization that has ever existed and walks around wondering how he got so lucky as to be born or naturalized an American. - Dennis Prager

THE AIRPORT SECURITY ANSWER

What do the Israeli airport-security people do that American airport-security people do not do? They profile. They question some individuals for more than half an hour, open up all their luggage, and spread the contents on the counter — and they let others go through with scarcely a word. And it works…Will America be undermined from within by an administration obsessed with political correctness and intoxicated with the adolescent thrill of exercising its new-found powers? Stay tuned. - Thomas Sowell

RACISM AND SEXISM HYPOCRISY

The highlight of the news video is, of course, the portion featuring a black female student who tells us that we still need diversity centers because of the persistence of racism and sexism. But she made the statement while wearing big black sorority letters emblazoned on her blouse. In other words, while lecturing us on the persistence of racism and sexism she was touting her membership in an organization that limits its membership to blacks and women. The hypocrisy of asking the public to fund “solutions” to the “problems” she is exacerbating is simply staggering. - Mike Adams

THE KEYNESIAN LIE

policymakers are committing what economist Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” in micromanaging the economic cycle. Hayek hated policy intervention of any kind…Hayek was associated with the Austrian school, which argued that the private sector should be left free to carry out the task of any readjustment in a downturn. Faith in the market’s purging power served the U.S. well in the 19th century, when the economy emerged stronger after each recession, but was taken too far in the policy mix of tight money and high taxes that led to the Great Depression and the rise of the Keynesians. Keynes would probably never have supported big government deficits during boom times, such as those that led to our current debt crisis. Likewise, Friedman would probably not have backed the new Fed use of monetary policy as a tool to engineer expansion rather than merely cushion the pain in a downturn. The systematic perversion of Keynes’s and Friedman’s thought is now resulting in a fall in their fortunes, leaving Hayek triumphant, once again. -Ruchir Sharma

Wisdom and insight- The best of the week. 11/15/10

2010-11-19T15:34:00.003-05:00

I did not write that man is inherently evil. I wrote that he is not basically good. And, yes, that does make the world sad. So do disease, earthquakes, death and all the unjust suffering in the world. But sad facts remain facts. A distinguishing characteristic of liberals and leftists, … is their aversion to acknowledging sad facts. – Dennis Prager

In 1920, when the top tax rate was 73 percent, for people making over $100,000 a year, the federal government collected just over $700 million in income taxes — and 30 percent of that was paid by people making over $100,000. After a series of tax cuts brought the top rate down to 24 percent, the federal government collected more than a billion dollars in income-tax revenue — and people making over $100,000 a year now paid 65 percent of the taxes.-Thomas Sowell

People behave differently when tax rates are high as compared with when they are low. With low tax rates, they take their money out of tax shelters and put it to work in the economy, benefiting themselves, the economy, and government, which collects more money in taxes because incomes rise. High tax rates that very few people are actually paying because of tax shelters do not bring in as much revenue as lower tax rates that people are paying.- Thomas Sowel

l Nothing raises the ire of cynical liberals more than a happy-go-lucky, totally unburdened, freethinking and self-assured conservative woman who has everything she wants and then some. And without anyone's help…Liberalism, after all, needs to imagine an unhappy populace. Passing sweeping entitlement programs and convincing voters that big government is the answer only works if people are frustrated with their stations in life.-S.E. Cupp

If we truly want our Constitution back, Charlie Rangel needs to be impeached for “high crimes and Misdemeanors,” not given a slap on the wrist. -Dean Kalahar

The nation's founders would be horrified by today's congressional spending that consumes 25 percent of our GDP. Contrast that to the years 1787 to the 1920s when federal government spending never exceeded 4 percent of our GDP except in wartime.- Walter Williams

Can a bi-partisan Balanced Budget Amendment pass? It almost did already. Aug. 4, 1982, by a vote of 69 to 31 in the Senate, two more than the two-thirds vote required for approval of a constitutional amendment. The Senate vote was bipartisan: 47 Republicans, 21 Democrats and 1 Independent voted for the amendment. In the House of Representatives by way of a discharge petition the vote was 236 to 187, it did not meet the two-thirds required by Article V of the Constitution. The House vote was again bipartisan: 167 Republicans, 69 Democrats. Source: Walter Williams

On the question as to what % of GDP should the federal government spend, Walter Williams said: “if 10 percent is good enough for the Baptist Church, it ought to be good enough for Congress.”

Obviously, some of the central bank's governors have been encouraged by Congress to think of themselves as more than mere bankers - as wizards of social control, even regulating society's reservoirs of self-esteem.-George Will

(Paul) Ryan, incoming chairman of the House Budget Committee, says the Fed thinks it can adroitly "put the cruise missile through the goal posts." But how adroit can Fed management of the economy be? No complex economy can be both managed and efficient, meaning dynamic. To think otherwise is what Friedrich Hayek called "the fatal conceit." That conceit can be fatal to the Fed's independence.-George Will

Does anyone find it alarming that for the first time in the nine-year war, the U.S. military is deploying heavily armored battle tanks to Afghanistan? Did you not assume tanks were being used- IN A WAR!-Dean Kalahar

G.M. will never buy back and sell off all of the shares that Uncle Sam owns because it has a stronger incentive to keep them in the game – and know they will always get bailed out- with a large enough holding to protect themselves from ever having to really compete. By the way, the government lost $9 billion of taxpayers’ original investment on Thursdays’ partial stock sale. Fell like a tycoon now? -Dean Kalahar

John Tyner, cleverly armed with an iPhone to give YouTube immortality to the encounter, took exception to the TSA guard about to give him the benefit of Homeland Security’s newest brainstorm — the upgraded, full-palm, up-the-groin, all-body pat-down. In a stroke, the young man ascended to myth, or at least the next edition of Bartlett’s, warning the agent not to “touch my junk.” Not quite the 18th-century elegance of “Don’t Tread on Me,” but the age of Twitter has a different cadence from the age of the musket. What the modern battle cry lacks in archaic charm, it makes up for in full-body syllabic punch. Don’t touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm-election voter. –Charles Krauthammer

Last week the Food and Drug Administration announced that it will soon require tobacco warning labels to be much bigger and more graphic…The proposed warnings include one containing an image of a man smoking through a tracheotomy hole in his throat; another depicting a body with a large scar running down the chest; and another showing a man who appears to be suffering a heart attack. Others have images of a corpse in a coffin and one with a toe tag in a morgue, diseased lungs and mouths, and a mother blowing smoke into a baby’s face. Apparently the theory behind such fulsome antismoking propaganda is that while everyone knows tobacco is unhealthy, some people need to have their noses rubbed in that fact as pungently and unpleasantly as possible. But when did it become the job of the federal government to treat American adults the way mothers and fathers treat children? ..There will always be some people who smoke, just as there will always be some people who drive recklessly or overeat or drink to excess. Should the manufacturer’s sticker on every new car be required to include images of horrible collisions and mangled motorists? Should packages of high-calorie junk food depict rolls of flabby cellulite or a patient undergoing bypass surgery? Should beer and wine bottles be covered with grisly pictures of ruined livers or passed-out drunks?..There always seem to be good reasons for giving them (government) just a little more authority, for agreeing to surrender just a few more personal choices, for letting yourself be treated just a bit more condescendingly. But it comes at a price. Smoking is unhealthy, no question about it. The loss of freedom and self-respect is more hazardous by far.-Jeff Jacoby

Notable and quoteable

2010-11-16T12:45:00.004-05:00

"Best of"- Keeping it simple

2010-11-12T14:50:00.002-05:00

If the government pays people not to work and taxes people who do work, is it really so difficult to see why employment is so low?- Arthur Laffer

The mother of all supply-side reforms is incentive pay for politicians...In business, firms align the incentives of decision makers with the incentives of shareholders to ensure that they take the best course of action. Washington must begin doing the same by creating an incentive structure that pays elected officials according to factors such as stock market performance and economic growth. – Arthur Laffer

“Green” President Obama, who lectures us on protecting the environment through things like cap and trade legislation, will not agree to the free trade deal with South Korea because Korean built cars and trucks have better fuel and environmental standards than US cars and trucks. In other words, the President is pro-environment only as long as it does not diminish his power and relationship with unions. Hypocrite. –Dean Kalahar

If it is the first responsibility of the Federal Reserve to protect the dollars that Americans earn and save, is it not dereliction of duty for the Fed to pursue a policy to bleed value from those dollars?… Bernanke is not just risking inflation. He is inducing inflation.-Pat Buchanan

We shouldn't be playing around with inflation. It's not for nothing Reagan called it 'as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man. The Fed's pump-priming addiction has got our small businesses running scared and our allies worried. The German finance minister called the Fed's proposals 'clueless. When Germany, a country that knows a thing or two about the dangers of inflation, warns us to think again, maybe it's time for Chairman Bernanke to cease and desist. We don't want temporary, artificial economic growth bought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings. -Sarah Palin

When it comes to the increasing sex, violence and profanity in entertainment media, the social libertines are indifferent. They insist that children will hardly be warped or ruined by the media they consume. They chortle at the paranoia of Hollywood critics. Their mantra: If you don't like it, just turn the channel. But if the issue isn't indecency, but instead, say, obesity, so many of those titans of "tolerance" suddenly become the censors. -Brent Bozell

Anti-bullying campaign is just “hate crime” legislation for kids

2010-11-10T10:03:00.002-05:00

By Dean Kalahar

November 9, 2010

The anti-bullying campaign is once again upon us. It kicked off on October 20^th, with the official LGBT day of wearing purple to raise awareness against bullying. What was notable is how many eagerly joined the cause and wore purple. After all, who would not be in support of what seems to be a simple cause. Since, the bandwagon mentality of conventional morality failed to address bullying with any critical or objective analysis; it might be prudent to look at the subject more closely.

We all have stories of being bullied or being the one bulling. It has and continues to be a part of growing up, and some might say is a “right of passing” in learning the tough lessons and the sometimes brutal meaning of life. Everyone surely has a story of childhood “bullying,” so why did we turn out ok after suffering such torment?

For generations kids got through the trials and tribulations of the “crosses we have to bear” without a lot of fanfare or psychological effects. In days gone by life, and the taunting that comes with it, made kids stronger, more whole, and well adjusted. Today, we live in a therapeutic world where everything has to be safe, warm and fuzzy. And although living without bullying seems at face value to be the correct ideal, without it, something would just seem to be missing in the maturation process. Maybe it’s time to stop shielding kids from the process of being kids who turn into productive adults and ask some questions.

Is the anti-bullying campaign actually hurting our children? Where is all this anti-bullying rhetoric coming from? Are we being bullied into believing bullying is bad?

Those who fight against bullying hold a invalid worldview of man, believing he is, by his nature, good and perfectible. Sure it would be a wonderful ideal if everyone would love his fellow man. But in the world of reality, human nature has a brutal side and all the hope in the world for man to alter his universal nature is a waste of time at best and arrogant at worst.

So what should we do regarding our children’s safety and security? First and last, we have laws against assault and battery, and no one is suggesting we ignore them and do not teach alternative methods of dealing with conflicts. But protecting kids from the human condition does little to actually prepare them for life dealing with the human condition. In fact, science is beginning to look at bullying with an evolutionary light.

Bullying is seen as abusive and gratuitous when resources are abundant and warfare unnecessary, but aggressive human behavior always lies just under the surface. Research may show that hyper-aggressive males, no matter how grotesque and unfashionable they seem, would not exist if they did not confer some evolutionary advantage on their species. For example, Baboon behavior shows that when resources diminish, baboon bullies become prized members of the troop in helping to drive others from limited food supplies. In other words, natural instincts and economic realities tied to self reliance may drive us to behave in certain ways, including aggressive bullying, that saves lives.

Other research shows that similar behavior patterns of bullying exist in wolves and chimpanzees, among other animals. This leads researchers to believe that there might be some social benefit from a pattern that seems wholly destructive. One hypothesis is that bullying exists because there is some social or personal benefit. If there was no benefit, then there would be no purpose for it. Evolutionarily speaking, the trait for bullying could only survive if there was a benefit, to either life span or reproduction that makes it useful to the person carrying it.

In The Moral Animal, Robert Wright states, "Throw a bunch of hens together, and, after a time of turmoil, including much combat, things will settle down.” Disputes over food will become brief and decisive, as one hen simply pecks the other, bringing quick deferral and forming a simple, linear hierarchy, wherein every hen knows its place. Why would this "pecking order" be useful? It provides a hierarchy that keeps members of a group from continually vying for power and control. It keeps the stronger members from wasting energy and keeps the weaker members from continually being hurt when they lose in a struggle.

Whether good or bad, we could say that this creates a certain amount of order in a social group-whether it's animals or children. But this only explains how it benefits a social group and doesn't explain why bullying continues even after hierarchies or "pecking orders" have been established. For this, we must examine the possible personal benefits of bullying.

In the article, "Words That Wound," the author states that, "Theories...vary on why children become bullies, but most agree that bullies gain power and enjoy the control they have over others." It seems that bullying is mostly about having power and control over others. This may have effects on the status of an individual bully, and it may also affect the way a bully feels about himself. In the book, Developing a Social Psychology of Monkeys and Apes, the author states that, "Dominance has not been a negligible issue in primate studies. Higher or lower rank is thus as influential in social interactions as they are in human societies.”

Continuing, the author states that, "Control, in monkeys and apes, is used to improve mating and feeding opportunities or to anticipate and avoid the aggressive actions of others." Although mating and feeding are probably not applicable to the social hierarchies of children, these observations from the animal kingdom may apply to the way dominance and bullying work for them.

Scientists hypothesize that the personal benefits for a bully include higher self-esteem, better access to resources and, as with the monkeys and apes, avoidance of the aggressive actions of others. Lastly, some suggest bullying helps an individual actually avoid the aggressive actions of others, by being aggressive himself or herself.

The subject of bullying within a culture is a dynamic question that must not be taken lightly. Sound research and children’s safety concerns should be priority one. But we must not jump to conclusions regarding bullying just because it feels or sounds like it is bad. In addition, questioning why the campaign is being pushed so fervently needs to be asked.

The LBGT is the group responsible for promoting the “wear purple” anti-bullying campaign. Why is only an acronym given to a group promoting the demonstration? LGBT is an acronym referring collectively to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. The same group that promotes hate crime legislation and special victim status is using the anti-bullying message as a generic form of “hate crime” legislation on children. They do this in order to push an agenda of universal acceptance and extra-legal standing in society.

Controlling genuine assault and battery on children is a fundamental issue, and laws are already in place to protect all citizens. Indoctrinating children to push a sensitive and controversial adult issue, however, is disingenuous and disgraceful. What would be ironic, if it was not so disturbing, is those who pretend to want to protect kids by promoting an anti-bullying agenda will not think twice about “bullying” those who dare to offer a counter argument and expose their agenda.

Sources:
Jeremy Smith & Todd Nadenicheck, Biting the Underdog
Michael Brown, Gay Is Good Or Bullying Is Bad? A Teachable Moment.
Dr. Christopher Bailey, The Benefits of Bullying,

Ending the political “Ponzi” scheme that will destroy the nation

2010-10-12T15:50:00.001-04:00

Annotated synopsis of America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution

By Angelo M. Codevilla, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University

From The American Spectator

By Dean Kalahar

10/10/10

Not very often is an analysis of America offered with the power and focus to change the path of our cultural understanding of who we are as a nation. A notable example would be Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution by Angelo M. Codevilla is another seminal piece of American cultural and political analysis. It explains how America has lost its roots and national identity. It is a must read for Americans faced with fundamental change in the nation.

Everyone is urged to read the full length treatise, but because the analysis is so detailed, this annotated synopsis will allow for easier understanding and application of Codevilla’s fundamental precepts. It is intended to be a blueprint to identify the cause and symptoms of our national illness, while offering a sobering cure to remedy a nation that realizes it is sick, but is in denial of the strong medicine it must swallow to once again regain its health.

A brief history of American political classes

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed.

In America, the notion of human equality has always been a hard sell, because experience teaches us that we are so unequal in so many ways, and because making one's self superior is so tempting. But human equality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, because they were yearning for equal treatment under British law, or because they had read John Locke.

Today, America’s two political classes, the “Ruling Class” and “County Class,” have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity.

This self-anointed ego-centric worldview spread when Franklin Roosevelt brought Woodrow Wilson’s “progressive” ruling class into his administration and began the process that turned them into true “rulers.” FDR described America's problems in technocratic terms. America's problems would be fixed by a "brain trust," picked by him naturally. His New Deal's solutions, the alphabet-soup "independent" agencies that have run America ever since, turned many Progressives into powerful bureaucrats and then into lobbyists.

Fast forward 100 years and our nation faces a frightening crossroad between what made us and who we have become.

The problem

How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them?

Our classes' clash is over "whose country" America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand."

As bureaucrats and teachers' unions disempowered neighborhood school boards, while the governments of towns, counties, and states were becoming conduits for federal mandates, as the ruling class reduced the number and importance of things that American communities could decide for themselves, America's thirst for self-governance has reawakened.

The fact that public employees are almost always paid more and have more generous benefits than the private sector people whose taxes support them has only sharpened the sense among many in the country class that they now work for public employees rather than the other way around.

The ruling class's manifold efforts to discredit and drive worship of God out of public life convinced many among the vast majority of Americans who believe and pray that today's regime is hostile to the most important things of all. Not even the Soviet Union arrested students for wearing crosses or praying, or reading the Bible on school property, as some U.S. localities have done in response to Supreme Court rulings. Every December, we are reminded that the ruling class deems the very word "Christmas" to be offensive. Let members of the country class object to anything the ruling class says or does, and likely as not their objection will be characterized as "religious," that is to say irrational, that is to say not to be considered on a par with the "science" of which the ruling class is the sole legitimate interpreter.

Democratic politicians are the ruling class's prime legitimate representatives because while Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters, while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most democrats/liberals are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans, a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents, lack a vehicle in electoral politics. Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority's demand for representation will be filled.

In 2010, Americans' conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.

The ruling class has been running a patronage ponzi scheme using the pretext of Darwinian compassion between the government and the people. The country class citizens are finally realizing they are being gamed, while the ruling class gamers are not about to give up their meal ticket. Friction between Americans has not been this tense since the civil war.

The Ruling Class defined
· Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector.
· Today's ruling class was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.
· They have a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints.
· Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters and speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity.
· Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct.
· America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats.
· It rules uneasily in one breadth and arrogantly in the next over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
· The ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government.
· The heads of the class do live in our big cities' priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate. Regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative "nonprofit" and "philanthropic" sectors and public policy.
· Whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government.
· They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets.
· They are teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be elites in the ruling class yet identify morally with what they think are the grievances of what they consider are their lesser class of Americans.
· Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class.
· Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity or social harmony, being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs.
· Share the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, give lip service to its ideals and shibboleths (empty rhetoric used by the class,) and be willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members so as to profitably move among the establishment's parts.
· Identity to the ruling class always trumps achievement.
· Get into America's "top schools" not as a matter of passing exams but having an attractive social profile.
· Attend the “best" colleges who require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages.
· Recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in.
· The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records.
· The ruling class does not stunt itself through negative selection. Actually, the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.
· Attitude is key- with its first tenet being that "we" are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained.
· They do not believe the founding generation's paradigm that "all men are created equal" And find it "a self-evident lie."
· Believe the "scientific" notion, which Darwin only popularized, that man is the product of chance mutation and natural selection of the fittest.
· Believe that “by nature,” superior men subdue inferior ones as they subdue lower beings or try to improve them as they please. Hence while it pleased the abolitionists to believe in freeing Negroes and improving them, it also hypocritically pleased them to believe that Southerners had to be punished and reconstructed by force.
· Transformed from an educated class with religious fervor to one focused on social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers.
· Think themselves as “Progressives” who imagine themselves the world's examples and the worlds reformers dreaming big dreams of establishing order, justice, and peace at home and abroad while ignoring basic realities of human nature.
· They are not shy about their desire for power.
· They view World War I and the chaos at home and abroad that followed that discredited their worldview as not a failure of their vision. In fact, the ruling class found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people's backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America. The American people had failed them because democracy in its American form perpetuated the worst in humanity.
· The ruling class progressives look down on the masses, look on themselves as the vanguard, and look abroad for examples to emulate.
· Some ruling class “Progressives” have historically joined the "vanguard of the proletariat," the Communist Party. Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as they were to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. They promise energetically to transcend their peoples' ways and to build "the new man."
· Blamed WWII on the majority of Americans, because they had refused to lead the League of Nations.
· Believe in evolution theory without compromise. In 1925, the ruling class progressives and the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored a legal challenge to a Tennessee law that required teaching the biblical account of creation to drive home the point that Americans who believed in the Bible were willful ignoramuses.
· The ruling class believes that the Christian and Orthodox Jewish family is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles.
· Our educated ruling class is generally bitter about America and show little sense of humor
· Believing only they can be “scientific," the Progressive class sought to explain its differences and distaste for common Americans "scientific" terms. Their “studies” concluded that most who were not liberal Democrats were latent fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives filtered down to college curricula.
· Common among the ruling class is a belief in the notion that the common people are animals whose words are, “like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration,”
· See the common folk as opponents to their utopia because clinging to "God and guns" as a sign of their inferiority.
· The ruling class knows that Americans must learn to live more densely and close to work, that they must drive smaller cars and change their lives to use less energy, that their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept limits in how much medical care they get, that they must divert more of their money to support people, cultural enterprises, and plans for the planet that the ruling class deems worthier.
· On occasion the ruling class slips up and confidently says "what everybody” –at least the ones that matter, i.e.us- know is true."
· They believe they alone have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct “us”, truths the grasping of which entitles “us” to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean.
· The ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof.
· It is a "machine," that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. They must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges, civic as well as economic, to the party's clients, directly or indirectly.
· The ruling class's standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government. Meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc.
· The ruling class provides rank-and-file activists/members with modest livelihoods as they enhance mightily the upper levels' wealth.
· More power for the ruling class has been the ruling class's solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming.
· The ruling class denies its opponents' legitimacy. Seldom does a Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs without reiterating the litany of his class's claim to authority, contrasting it with opponents who are either uninformed, stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist, or all of the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting the ruling class, will be dispirited.

What has happened to our nation as a result of the ruling class?

· Our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty.

· Ruling class power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it.
· By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life,
· By tampering with civil equality endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices -- even to buy in the first place -- modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency's value for all.
· Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally.
For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits…Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others.
· The members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.
· By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support.
For example: in the 1990s and 2000s, as Democrats and Republicans forced banks to make loans for houses to people and at rates they would not otherwise have considered, builders and investors had every reason to make as much money as they could from the ensuing inflation of housing prices. When the bubble burst, only those connected with the ruling class at the bottom and at the top were bailed out. Similarly, by taxing the use of carbon fuels and subsidizing "alternative energy," our ruling class created arguably the world's biggest opportunity for making money out of things that few if any would buy absent its intervention. The ethanol industry and its ensuing diversions of wealth exist exclusively because of subsidies. The prospect of legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions and allot certain amounts to certain companies set off a feeding frenzy among large companies to show support for a "green agenda," because such allotments would be worth tens of billions of dollars. That is why companies hired some 2,500 lobbyists in 2009 to deepen their involvement in "climate change." At the very least, such involvement profits them by making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any "green jobs" thus created are by definition creatures of subsidies -- that is, of privilege… it surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.
· Beyond patronage, picking economic winners and losers redirects the American people's energies to tasks that the political class deems more worthy than what Americans choose for themselves.
· Ever-greater taxes and intrusive regulations are the main wrenches by which the American people can be improved, and yes, by which the ruling class feeds and grows
· The ruling class's perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of the citizenry's elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government's plans, and to craft a "living" Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to "positive rights" -- meaning charters of government power.
For example: the Supreme Court's 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr which, by setting the single standard "one man, one vote" for congressional districts, ended up legalizing the practice of "gerrymandering," concentrating the opposition party's voters into as few districts as possible while placing one's own voters into as many as possible likely to yield victories. That is why today's Congress consists more and more of persons who represent their respective party. Once districts are gerrymandered "safe" for one party or another, the voters therein are countless because party leaders can count more on elected legislators to toe the party line. To the extent party leaders do not have to worry about voters, they can choose privileged interlocutors, representing those in society whom they find most amenable.
· In America, ever more since the 1930s, the ruling class in government has designated certain individuals, companies, and organizations within each of society's sectors as (junior) partners in elaborating laws and administrative rules for those sectors. The government empowers the persons it has chosen over those not chosen, deems them the sector's true representatives, and rewards them. They become part of the ruling class.
· Bureaucrats make, enforce, and adjudicate nearly all the rules. Today's legal-administrative texts are incomprehensibly detailed and freighted with provisions crafted exquisitely to affect equal individuals unequally. Equal treatment under law is an antiquated idea.
· Disregard for the text of laws -- for the dictionary meaning of words and the intentions of those who wrote them -- in favor of the decider's discretion has permeated our ruling class from the Supreme Court to the lowest local agency. Ever since Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in 1920 (Missouri v. Holland) that presidents, Congresses, and judges could not be bound by the U.S. Constitution regarding matters that the people who wrote and ratified it could not have foreseen, it has become conventional wisdom among our ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution while pretending allegiance to it.
For example: by 2010 some in the ruling class felt confident enough to dispense with the charade. Asked what in the Constitution allows Congress and the president to force every American to purchase health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied: "Are you serious? Are you serious?"
· Lower court judges and bureaucrats take liberties with laws, regulations, and contracts. That is why legal words that say you are in the right avail you less in today's America than being on the right side of the persons who decide what they want those words to mean.
· As the discretionary powers of officeholders and of their informal entourages have grown, the importance of policy and of law itself is declining, citizenship is becoming vestigial, and the American people become ever more dependent.
· The ruling class is keener to reform the American people's family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones.
· They legislate, regulate, and exhort in support not of "the family,” meaning married parents raising children, but rather of "families," meaning mostly households based on something other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage, except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize "child care" for those who do not.
For example: rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty.
· Top Republicans and Democrats have also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by parading their affairs; and consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is "contrary to societal norms."
· While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental; advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority.
· The ruling class's assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive.
For example: school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents' consent, the people who run America's schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents' knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence.
· At the very heart of what our ruling class is about, and explicit in our ruling class's actions, is the dismissal of the American people's intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others' comprehension.
· The ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, "scientific" judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government declares, and its associated press echoes that "scientists say" this or that, ordinary people -- or for that matter scientists who "don't say," or are not part of the ruling class -- lose any right to see the information that went into what "scientists say."
· Though they cannot prevent Americans from worshiping God, they can make it as socially disabling as smoking. Though they cannot make Americans wish they were Europeans, they continue to press upon this nation of refugees from the rest of the world the notion that Americans ought to live by "world standards."
· America's self anointed “best and brightest” believe themselves qualified and duty bound to direct the lives not only of Americans but of foreigners as well that America cannot be free until the whole world is free and hence that America must push and prod mankind to freedom. Indeed, they conflate the two purposes in the face of the American people's insistence to draw a bright line between war against our enemies and peace with non-enemies in whose affairs we do not interfere.
· Because our ruling class deems unsophisticated the American people's perennial preference for decisive military action or none, its default solution to international threats has been to commit blood and treasure to long-term, twilight efforts to reform the world's Vietnams, Somalias, Iraqs, and Afghanistans, believing that changing hearts and minds is the prerequisite of peace and that it knows how to change them. The apparently endless series of wars in which our ruling class has embroiled America, wars that have achieved nothing worthwhile at great cost in lives and treasure, has contributed to defining it, and to discrediting it -- but not in its own eyes.
· Rather, even as our ruling class has lectured, cajoled, and sometimes intruded violently to reform foreign countries in its own image, it has apologized to them for America not having matched that image -- their private image.
· In sum, our ruling class does not like the rest of America. Most of all does it dislike that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of the world and like it that way. For our ruling class, however, America is a work in progress, just like the rest the world, and they are the engineers.

The Country Class defined

· America's country class is heterogeneous.
· It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious.
· It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty.
· It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers' defining ideas and proclivities -- e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc.
· Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded by the ruling class.
· The country class is the other side of the ruling class's coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice.
· While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members' yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others.
· Even when members of the country class happen to be government officials or officers of major corporations, their concerns are essentially private; in their view, government owes to its people equal treatment rather than action to correct what anyone perceives as imbalance or grievance.
· They tend to oppose special treatment, whether for corporations or for social categories. Rather than gaming government regulations, they try to stay as far from them as possible.
· They believe in private property rights are directly tied to defining morality and thus are a large part of natural law.
· America's pro-family movement is a reaction to the ruling class's challenges: emptying marriage of legal sanction, promoting abortion, and progressively excluding parents from their children's education.
· Negative orientation to privilege distinguishes the country class corporate officer who tries to keep his company from joining the Business Council of large corporations who have close ties with government from the fellow in the next office. The first wants the company to grow by producing. The second wants it to grow by moving to the government trough.
· It sets apart the schoolteacher who resents the union to which he is forced to belong for putting the union's interests above those of parents who want to choose their children's schools.
· In general, the country class includes all those in stations high and low who are aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by comparison with what just a little connection with the right bureaucracy can get you. It includes those who take the side of outsiders against insiders, of small institutions against large ones, of local government against the state or federal.
· The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever.
· Members of the country class who want to rise in their profession through sheer competence try at once to avoid the ruling class's rituals while guarding against infringing its prejudices.
· They tend to think that exams should play a major role in getting or advancing in jobs, whose records of performance, including academic ones, should be matters of public record, and that professional disputes should be settled by open argument.
· They believe competence trumps political connections or correctness.
· Nothing has set the country class apart, defined it, made it conscious of itself, given it whatever coherence it has and sparked an inner energy than the condescension emanating from the ruling class and their insistent worldview that people other than themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior.
· Persons who were brought up to believe themselves as worthy as anyone, who manage their own lives to their own satisfaction, naturally resent politicians of both parties who say that the issues of modern life are too complex for any but themselves.
· Most are insulted by the ruling class's dismissal of opposition as mere "anger and frustration," which is code for meaning stupidity, while others just scoff at the claim that the ruling class's bureaucratic language demonstrates superior intelligence.
· A few ask the fundamental question: Since when and by what right does intelligence trump human equality? Moreover, if the politicians are so smart, why have they made life worse?
· The country class actually believes in exceptionalism, that America's ways are superior to the rest of the world's, and regards most of mankind as less free, less prosperous, and less virtuous.
· Thus while it delights in croissants and thinks Toyota's factory methods are worth imitating, it dislikes the idea of adhering to "world standards."
· This class also takes part in the U.S. armed forces body and soul: nearly all the enlisted, non-commissioned officers and officers under flag rank belong to this class in every measurable way.
· Few vote for the Democratic Party. You do not doubt that you are amidst the country class rather than with the ruling class when the American flag passes by or "God Bless America" is sung after seven innings of baseball.
· Unlike the ruling class, the country class does not share a single intellectual orthodoxy, set of tastes, or ideal lifestyle. Its different sectors draw their notions of human equality from different sources: Christians and Jews believe it is God's law. Libertarians assert it from Hobbesian and Darwinist bases. Many consider equality the foundation of Americanism. Others just hate snobs.

What is the country class agenda?

· Each of the country class's diverse parts has its own agenda, which flows from the peculiar ways in which the ruling class impacts its concerns.
· Independent businesspeople are naturally more sensitive to the growth of privileged relations between government and their competitors.
· Persons who would like to lead their community rue the advantages that Democratic and Republican party establishments are accruing.
· Parents of young children and young women anxious about marriage worry that cultural directives from on high are dispelling their dreams.
· The faithful to God sense persecution.
· All resent higher taxes and loss of freedom.
· More and more realize that their own agenda's advancement requires concerting resistance to the ruling class across the board.
· Not being at the table when government makes the rules about how you must run your business, knowing that you will be required to pay more, work harder, and show deference for the privilege of making less money.
· In our time the interpenetration of government and business -- the network of subsidies, preferences, and regulations -- is so thick and deep, the people "at the table" receive and recycle into politics so much money, that independent businesspeople cannot hope to undo any given regulation or grant of privilege.
· Just as no manufacturer can hope to reduce the subsidies that raise his fuel costs, no set of doctors can shield themselves from the increased costs and bureaucracy resulting from government mandates.
· Independent business's agenda has been to resist the expansion of government in general and of course to reduce taxes. Pursuit of this agenda with arguments about economic efficiency and job creation -- and through support of the Republican Party -- usually results in enough relief to discourage more vigorous remonstrance.
· Have come to a time when just “dealing with it,” and being good, patient, forgiving people who try to follow the golden rule is no longer an option.

Review of Differences between the ruling class and the country class

· While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the image and likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to His nature's laws, the enlightened ones know that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the will to primacy.
· While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns.
· Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest. Science is "science" only in the "right" hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.
For example: by identifying science and reason with themselves, our rulers delegitimize opposition. Each day, the ruling class produces new "studies" that show that one or another of Americans' habits is in need of reform, and that those Americans most resistant to reform are pitiably, perhaps criminally, wrong. Thus the ruling class goes about disaggregating and dispiriting the ruled.
· As the ruling class's appetite for deference, power, and perks grows, the country class disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks.
· The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept.
· The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance.
· The ruling class believes human nature is good and man can be perfected, if only they are allowed to try. They do not know and cannot answer the question “who am I” on a personal level, and most certainly can’t fathom something greater than themselves, be it God, or natural laws of man including life, liberty and property, so they must continue to tell themselves that they are whole and special while ironically claiming to believe in “science” while ignoring basic concepts of biology and universal law.
· The country class is not being represented, the two classes are at odds, there is a vacuum of power, and something has to give or the nation is going to experience an explosion.

What the country class should avoid

Suppose that the Country Party (whatever its name might be) were to capture Congress, the presidency, and most statehouses? It would be tempted to write its wish list of reforms into law regardless of the Constitution and enact them by partisan majorities supported by interest groups that gain from them, while continuing to vilify the other side.

If the country class carries out its own "revolution from above" to reverse the ruling class's previous "revolution from above," it would have made that ruinous practice standard in America. Moreover, a revolution designed at party headquarters would be antithetical to the country class's diversity as well as to the American Founders' legacy.

It is fundamental that the people take back power through leadership of their choosing under the auspices of the Constitution.

The country class plan of action

Restoring localities' traditional powers over schools, including standards, curriculum, and prayer, would take repudiating two generations of Supreme Court rulings. So would the restoration of traditional "police" powers over behavior in public places. Bringing public employee unions to heel is only incidentally a matter of cutting pay and benefits. As self-governance is crimped primarily by the powers of government personified in its employees, restoring it involves primarily deciding that any number of functions now performed and the professional specialists who perform them, e.g., social workers, are superfluous or worse, unnecessary. Explaining to one's self and neighbors why such functions and personnel do more harm than good and must be ended and eliminated, while the ruling class brings its powers to bear to discredit you, is a very revolutionary thing to do. It will take guts, personal growth, education and principle to restore America.

· Stopping the ruling class's intrusions requires discrediting its entire conception of man, of right and wrong, as well as of the role of courts in popular government. That revolutionary task would involve far more than legislation.
· Passing national legislation is easier than getting people to take up the responsibilities of citizens, fathers, and entrepreneurs. The culture and all of its institutions needs to be realigned with founding principles.
· Resistance to secularism's intellectual and moral core, along with aggressive, intolerant secularism which is the moral and intellectual basis of the ruling class's claim to rule. Whether to the immorality of economic subsidies and privileges, or to the violation of the principle of equal treatment under equal law, or to its seizure of children's education.
· In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, will involve far more than electoral politics.
· A focus on all institutions of society as a place for rebuilding America: government, yes, but also through the economy, family, education system, and houses of worship.
· Sweeping away a half century's accretions of bad habits -- taking care to preserve the good among them is hard enough. Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder, especially as the country class wholly lacks organization. By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions and is well represented by the Democratic Party. Reform needs leadership, organization and offensive behaviors.
· Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle and perhaps the coherence to establish one. In the short term at least, the country class has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, which is eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s.
· Few Republican voters, never mind the larger country class, have confidence that the party is on their side. Because, in the long run, the country class will not support a party as conflicted as today's Republicans.
· Republican politicians who really want to represent it will either reform the party in an unmistakable manner, or start a new one as Whigs like Abraham Lincoln started the Republican Party in the 1850s.
· The name of the party that will represent America's country class is far less important than what, precisely, it represents and how it goes about representing it because, for the foreseeable future, American politics will consist of confrontation between what we might call the Country Party and the ruling class.
· Challenging the Democratic Party having transformed itself into a unit with near-European discipline would seem to require empowering a rival party at least as disciplined. Any country party would have to be wise and skillful indeed not to become the Democrats' mirror image. Yet to defend the country class, to break down the ruling class's presumptions, it has no choice but to imitate the Democrats, at least in some ways and for a while.
· For the country class seriously to contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it will have to discredit not just such patent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control "climate change," and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party would have to attack the ruling class's fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one's own.
· Achieving the country class's inherently revolutionary objectives in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with its own diversity would require the Country Party to use legislation primarily as a tool to remove obstacles, to instruct, to reintroduce into American life ways and habits that had been cast aside.
· Simultaneously reduce the taxes that most Americans resent requires eliminating the network of subsidies to millions of other Americans that these taxes finance, and eliminating the jobs of government employees who administer them because subsidies are morally wrong and economically counterproductive, and because the country cannot afford the practice in general.
· The electorate is likely to cut off millions of government clients, high and low, only if its choice is between no economic privilege for anyone and ratifying government's role as the arbiter of all our fortunes.
· The same goes for government grants to and contracts with so-called nonprofit institutions or non-governmental organizations. The case must be made against all arrangements by which the government favors some groups of citizens is easier to make than that against any such arrangement.
· If self-governance means anything, it means that those who exercise government power must depend on elections. The shorter the electoral leash, the likelier an official to have his chain yanked by voters, the more truly republican the government is.
· To subject the modern administrative state's agencies to electoral control requires ordinary citizens to take an interest in any number of technical matters. Law can require environmental regulators or insurance commissioners, or judges or auditors to be elected. But only citizens' discernment and vigilance could make these officials good. Only citizens' understanding of and commitment to law can possibly reverse the patent disregard for the Constitution and statutes that have permeated American life.
· Do not, as Lincoln warned, begin trifling with the Constitution for the most heartfelt of motives because it destroys Constitutional protections for all. But do not ignore the founder’s strict constitutional provisions allowing for change.
· The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoral success are obliged to follow them. In other words, the usually passive and gentle country class needs to get politically ruthless with a piercing intellectual focus that cuts the heart out of the ruling classes’ argument. In short, it’s time to take the gloves off to save the republic. Better to fight in the political arena then in the streets.

The inevitable clash of the classes

Though the country class had long argued along with Edmund Burke against making revolutionary changes, it faces the uncomfortable question common to all who have had revolutionary changes imposed on them: are we now to accept what was done to us just because it was done?

The clash between the two is about which side's vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side, especially the ruling class, embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side's view of itself. As such, the ruling class will not allow for wiggle room, while the country class must stop, once and for all, giving up ground and playing nice. One side or the other will prevail. The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable. No side will back-down without a fight. The question is: will the fight take place through political and institutional channels or social revolution?

The ruling class's greatest difficulty, aside from being outnumbered, will be to argue, against the grain of reality, that the revolution it continues to press upon America is sustainable. In other words, the political “Ponzi” scheme can continue forever. For its part, the country class's greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it. America has been imposed on enough. It is time for all country class patriots to take a stand and fight.

2010-10-01T12:35:00.001-04:00

“Fútbol Americano?”

By Dean Kalahar

September 29, 2010

The National Football league (NFL) plays a distinctly American game that is modeled after the very history and heritage of the United States. In Sal Paolantonio’s book: How football explains America, historic connections with football include: Manifest Destiny, The Battle of Midway, post war America, as well as the volatile 60’s. According to Paolantonio, the NFL mirrors the lives of Americans like Davey Crockett, Jackie Robinson, and Daniel Boone.

American football is indeed a living metaphor for freedom, capitalism, and republican government. It reminds our nation of the fundamental principles that make America great. Some of these include: rugged individualism, self determination, competition, equality of opportunity, teamwork, and the rule of law.

The NFL is currently promoting a campaign recognizing National Hispanic Heritage Month. It may be admirable for the NFL to recognize a month focusing on a particular group of Americans; but watching the “Jets de nueva York” play “Fútbol Americano” might leave you wondering how a game, that models the social fabric of our nation, has anything to do with promoting a selective celebration of a single ethnic group.

Why is football being devalued by the NFL’s current experiment in feel good therapeutic nonsense? In short, political correctness and a self serving attempt to increase revenue. Hopefully both reasons will backfire because Americans should be angered and saddened by the transparent attempt to pander to and capitalize on a specific ethnic group. Greater yet, Hispanic Americans should be embarrassed and outraged that the NFL feels they can be so easily manipulated.

The NFL aptly divides itself into the National Football Conference (NFC) and American Football Conference (AFC). The league has no business dividing Americans into selective ethnic groups in a cheap and veiled attempt at “sensitivity” to “diversity.” The NFL is the league of all Americans and should shy away from labeling and separating the Americans that made it great as well as profitable.

If this analysis is wrong, will the NFL promote the nine other nationally recognized heritage celebrations, and if not, why?

Asian-Pacific Heritage Month in May

National Italian American Heritage Month in October

Jewish American Heritage Month in May

National American Indian Heritage Month in November

Black history month in February

Women’s history month in March

Caribbean-American Heritage Month in June

Irish-American Heritage Month in March

National Bourbon Heritage Month in September

The cost of this myopic program, promoted under the auspices of multiculturalism, is the erosion of our American heritage and further corruption of our cultural capital. If the nation continues embracing a methodology of division, then misguided thinking will continue to rot the fibers that hold us together until we are broken as a nation. At which point the battles waged on the gridiron will pale by comparison to the wars we will wage for existence. Can you say Balkanization?

NFL Commissioner Goodell, and all other organizations that traffic in divisive nonsense, stop shamelessly promoting yourself under the disguise of tolerant compassion, and go back to the principles of managing the game that is made in America, played by Americans, and cheered for by Americans, no matter what their heritage.

Why Study Economics?

2010-06-21T09:17:00.003-04:00

From Practical Economics by Dean Kalahar

The first question that needs to be answered is why do you need to learn economics and what relevance does it have to your life? A simple analogy can be used to capture the life and death nature of economics.

Understanding economics is analogous to piloting an airplane that is flying in the fog. To be successful, a pilot must stop looking out the window for easily seen visual clues and put aside his instincts, feelings, common sense, and conventional wisdom. Instead, the pilot must rely solely on the instruments to safely fly and land the plane. To ignore the data, calibrations and technological concepts of aeronautics is to fly blindly in the fog.

The costs of flying “by the seat of one’s pants” will lead to immediate and deadly consequences not only for the pilot, but the passengers as well. Because of the relationship between pilot and passenger, unknown scores will have their livelihood, well being, and quality of life profoundly influenced by decisions made by the pilot. Relying on cold, impartial, instruments that go against what feels so certain may look like behavior of an overly trusting pilot, but this will prove to be the most successful and effective strategy for making decisions that affect so many people. Although the pilot will be motivated by self-interest, namely to save his own life; this will drive them to act in efficient and productive ways that benefit the greatest number of people, most notably the passengers.

“Piloting” economics works in the same way. The successful economist and economy must also be steered toward efficient decisions and outcomes based on facts, empirical evidence, and sound economic principles. True compassion for the greatest number of people lies in decision making that is based on economic reality and not on what sounds, feels or looks correct. Improper economic decision making has long term ramifications and far reaching effects on unknown scores of others within the society; the impact of which can be of tragic proportions.

The tools of economics offer all members of society the greatest chance of survival as well as the highest possible standard of living. The big question is: can you override your instinctive emotional decision making processes to engage in actions based on economic principles, formulas, functions, and paradoxical truths; or will you pilot the economy by flying by the seat of your pants?

Your decisions carry a weight and responsibility that you probably have not realized up to now. If you are ready for some formal instruction, this text should serve to enlighten and provide you with the cognitive skills necessary to use economic thinking to promote not only beneficial ends for yourself, but for others as well.

Kids must "shakedown" parents for teacher pay

2010-06-08T11:27:00.004-04:00

This story may make your head explode.

Selections: Basic lessons of cash grab , By Michael Graham http://www.bostonherald.com

And you thought liberal public schools didn’t believe in making kids work hard. Why they’re ready to bring back indentured servitude!

That’s what a mom named Laura Wellington just found out. Her daughter came home from school with instructions to “accomplish chores around the house with the goal of being paid by me for those chores the sum of $20,” Wellington wrote on her blog. “She would then have to hand the full $20 over to the school to make up for the shortfall in their overall budget.”

Her daughter’s participation, according to the information the school sent home, was mandatory. So you’re supposed to shake mom down for $20 and give it all to the teachers - no questions asked?

You’ll be stunned to learn this happened at a school in New Jersey.

And isn’t it interesting that this school was sending its little Johnnies and Julies home to collect, not for a field trip or class pizza day, but for the actual operating budget of the school. As in teacher salaries and benefits. This puts even more pressure on the kids. After all, now it’s nice Mrs. Johnson’s paycheck at stake.

This trend in public school fundraising is on the rise. According to The Boston Globe-Democrat, private donations to Massachusetts public schools have jumped from $10 million to $27 million in the past decade. . .

It could be worse. The New York Times reports that parents in the Cupertino, Calif., school system were hit up for contributions of $375 directly (cash or credit card) to avoid any cuts. . .

Unfortunately most teachers unions are happy to throw the taxpayers overboard at the first opportunity. Stuffing the kids’ backpacks with high-pressure fundraising appeals

Smaller pie and people die

2010-06-08T11:20:00.001-04:00

From Carpe Diem Blog, Mark Perry