The Danger of Reading Books

 

There are amongst us, people with differing reading habits. Some people read voraciously, always nose in the binding. Next there are people who read infrequently, but generally consider themselves readers. They keep books around, read a few books a year, would like to read more but it doesn’t get prioritized as often as they’d prefer. Then there are those who just don’t read. Those three categories should cover it.

It would be easy to state the obvious and claim that those who never read are to be considered the most dangerous category. But I don’t think that is true, and here is why.

Reading a lot of books is the absolute best and highest way to formulate a balanced and thorough world view. Reading books about a lot of subjects, books with competing narratives about different subjects, points and counterpoints. Read as many books about as many things as you can, break out of channels of thought and read across traditions, read across politically motivated ideological lines, read stories by people who did things, and read stories about people who did things. Take in the full breadth of human experience by reading a vast array of books, and you will find a steady and consistent world view, you will develop a practical empathy for humanity, a solid rock to stand on and assess the world around you with a refined perspective, not too heavily weighted by any one ideology or anecdote, and you will have a decent shot at clearly assessing events and behaviors around you as you move through time and space.

The next best reading habit to establish, and this is where I’ll depart from common wisdom, is the habit of reading no books at all. Next to reading as many books as you possibly can, reading no books at all is your best option. The person who reads no books at all, they’re going to have a more limited window on the greater world and its machinations, but instead will be intimately involved with the specifics of the immediate present. They need not be considered unintelligent, quite the contrary, they may be highly trained, highly capable, and high performing. Those with the least time to read are likely to be heavily correlated with those most busy in their daily endeavors. They may have a different path to finding their own global perspective, but the path of development will be consistently weighted as to the various inputs being assimilated through the course of their day. Their eventual “adult” or late life perspective (it takes a good third to half of your life in any case to establish a decent global perspective regardless of reading habits) will likely be effectively balanced and broad enough to take in daily occurrences and process forward projections effectively. This would be enough to manage their life without any unexpected shocks or disturbances in expectation of, and assimilation of, ongoing events, and also provide them with an anchored reality that is less easily swayed by intermittent panics or trends.

The person who will have the hardest time in that department will be those individuals who only read a few books. This is the worst possible reading habit to establish. When you only read a few books, each book will be too heavily weighted in your ongoing assimilation of reality. When a person reads a book once in a while, the time commitment to that endeavor and the lack of regular exercise of the mental processes used in reading and assimilating knowledge from books, those two factors collide to give the impression of something very important happening. The casual reader has a higher likelihood of considering the material they are consuming to be more important than it actually may be when considered in a broader world view. If you’re reading a book that is presenting a powerful new concept for you, something that seems to grip your psyche with intrigue and importance, your global world view is going to be highly affected by that book, certainly in the short term, but also likely in the long term throughout your life. If you have read three more books in the last couple weeks that also had such highly impactful insights, you are going to take each one successively in stride, building on each one, less swayed by each consecutive blow, as you carefully develop a polished and honed perspective. If this one insightful book is the only thing you’ve read in the last year or in the last quarter, then your global perspective is going to too affected by this one incoming perspective, this one book will be too heavily weighted as your ongoing global perspective calculations occur. You could accidentally shift your global perspective in a direction that was unintentional.  You could accidentally re-structure elements of your life, your identity, your affiliations, around this inappropriately weighted information, simply because of its novelty.

So, let us all read more. Let us read differing opinions. Let us understand the counterpoints to our current belief systems, and let’s check to see if we’re not accidentally operating on the lingering effects of some inappropriately weighted content we ingested along the way. Either read it all, or don’t read any of it. Half informed is far more dangerous than uninformed.

On Love and God (That Tension in Your Soul)

" In you is an endless well of Love. The tension you feel is the backpressure of your limitless love being stifled as you attempt to pour it into one shallow vessel after another."

There is a tension in your soul. It’s so permanent you might have lost sensitivity to it. But most likely, you feel it all the time. Every day, all day. There are a few distractions here and there, where the tension subsides, or relents momentarily, but it can quickly resume and consume you.

The human soul is a very deep well. Bottomless. And we exist in a temporal realm, where everything around us is, well, temporary. The language we can sometimes use is indicative of our needs. We might say of someone who is clearly committed to a goal, that they are “pouring their heart into their work.” This is more than an idiom.

The human soul is one thing above all. The human soul is the capacity for love. The human capacity for love, to be loved, to love, is infinite. There is no maximum capacity for love in the human soul, whether receiving or sending out. We are capable of love beyond our wildest imaginations, and many of us feel sparks of this at different times in life, with loved ones and friends, in times of ecstatic joy, we can feel love, if we let ourselves, we can feel love well up inside us and even bust out of the borders of our flesh and seemingly glow outward into the universe around us, outward and ever expanding, as if it were capable of filling all of time and space itself, infinitely and forever. Love is that infinite. Your ability to feel and project love is infinite. You are capable of infinite projections of love and beauty and joy.

But our daily lives are not generally lived to this capacity. We fill our days with menial tasks, chores, jobs that we maintain so we can pay a mortgage or rent, feed ourselves without having to plow fields, and burn our free time on whatever trivial distraction we can access moment to moment, subconsciously avoiding the consideration of why this tension keeps building up inside.

We have built up a society that can fool us into thinking we are seeking satisfaction in our actions and in our behaviors, even our possessions. We feel we are working towards something, a goal, a completion, a satisfaction that should come, but it never does. Or, if we do achieve a brief satisfaction from achieving an earthly goal, it is just that, brief and fleeting. We maybe enjoy a single beat, or maybe an entire evening before the tension and need to perform re-establishes its permanent seat in our psyche, and another vain attempt at satisfaction will begin. There is nothing on this earth that will satisfy you. It isn’t possible. You can immerse yourself in sport, song, hobbies, you can strive to accomplish the earthly goals of finance, you can cross off goals along the way and compare yourself to others, you can decide at some point that you are successful. But all you have and all the accoutrements of your success are temporary. Furthermore, it’s hard to see in youth, but becomes clearer with age, these material goals, these earthly goals, ultimately do not provide satisfaction, the tension never ceases. This is because these earthly goals are too shallow.

In you is an endless well of Love. The tension you feel is the backpressure of your limitless love being stifled as you attempt to pour it into one shallow vessel after another. We have structured our society to encourage this, the hunt for monetary wealth, power, prestige in the earthly realm, these are all temporal and shallow, entirely incapable of receiving the full measure of love that you possess. If you go about your days pouring your infinite heart into shallow vessels, the tension you feel will ultimately become immense and could bring you down under the sheer weight of the built-up pressure; you can become mentally and physically wore down.

There is only one vessel that can possibly contain the infinite love you are capable of. There is only one infinite being capable of receiving and reciprocating infinite love. God. You will not find peace until you find God. There is no earthly pleasure, process, or power that is deep enough, that has the infinite potential to fully accept your infinite love. Your attempts to pour your heart into shallow earthly vessels is causing the tension you feel. If instead, you pour your love into God, you begin to feel the infinite nature of love well up within you, you feel the tension actually dissipate, the pressure behind the dam is finally released, God can take it all! Let it out, send it out. You will begin to feel the love emanate from your soul out into the universe around you, the warmth of it will begin to bump into those around you. Tell them, tell them what you have done, when they feel it and look at you with wonder, tell them. Tell them you’ve woken up, you are no longer busy pouring your energy into shallow earthly affairs, you have allowed your love to bloom outward into the infinite space of God, and that they too can let go, and let their love flow outward. And your love can join with theirs. And the next person, and the next. Let your infinite love pour outward, filling the voids and gaps that distance you from those that have not yet seen the fate of a shallow existence. Let your love awaken them, let it penetrate their tunnel vision. Let it spark the love within them to overflow their shallow concerns and join with your expanding love into the heavens above.

Imagine the love of all souls on earth, growing outward from each individual, expanding outward and dissolving into each other, expanding further and upward into a heavenly harmonic song, ringing through the molecules of space and every instance of time, feel your love join together with the souls of eternity, the souls of the ages, in one singular vibration of harmonic ecstasy.

This and only this will heal the tension within you. Alleviate your fears of the future, your shallow concerns about daily affairs. These are merely distracting you from your purpose. Ring out love with every ounce of your being, pour out your heart, pour it out through time and space, through cell walls and planetary dust, send it out faster than the winds, pour it out in full into the endless reservoir of God. It is the only way. As fraught with conflict as our earthly realm is, the state of tension so high, with solutions seemingly so harsh yet the lack of solution even worse, and the trade-offs becoming increasingly unpalatable; the act of pouring your love into God, letting it expand ever outward, and allowing your love to infect the existence of those around you, that is likely the only Good that can be done.

Tax Fixed Income! Bonuses for Bankers!

 

There’s a distinct feeling of being fleeced that one gets each year around mid-April. I’m not one to think the Federal Government can or should be funded without the common and general support of the population, but it’s pretty hard to go through the income tax ritual every year without having some pretty dark feelings about the state of that Federal government and our collective finances as a society.

When we see the Federal government losing track of $15 billion dollars on occasion, just losing it, it’s difficult to sit for hours and diligently record the income and expenses of a middle-class family, dealing in the 10’s and 100’s of thousands of dollars, trying to sort out your declared share of the financial burden of the country, without feeling like a total rube. I mean, seriously? I need to report these hundred and low-thousand-dollar expenses, I need to classify each three and four figure interest statement? I need to send a check for an amount of money that is substantial in relation to my income and savings, but entirely invisible when compared to the frivolous outlays and outright loss and corruption, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, at the hands of our federal government? It’s asinine.

The four to five figure tax burden paid yearly by those in the middle class is a pittance in the face of our national expenses, even though they would be life changing amounts of money to the family forced to remit it. To truly add insult to injury, the taxes collected from everyone each year doesn’t cover the overall expenses of the government. It starts to feel preposterous that we have to continue the charade of paying taxes to support our government for our mutual societal interest when the funding of the government is done entirely through debt cycling, with very connected individuals profiting in the 8-9 figure range for managing the charade through various security and debt instruments.

Don’t forget the tax preparation industry raking a cool $104 billion dollars a year right off the top and the bankers that manage the slush fund of debt who reap seven figure bonuses. Meanwhile, a 72-year-old pensioner on a $3000 per month fixed income is sending $4000 a year to the IRS to “fund the activities of the government.”

This is not a system for the people. Those inclined to argue for higher taxes for the rich have good intentions, I think. They see there is an unfairness in the system and believe the culprit is tax cheating rich people. The mythology surrounding what rich people pay is pretty far off base from reality. The top one percent do pay the largest share of taxes, and that number is higher than most “tax-the-rich” folks would advocate for once they learn the actual number. The problem isn’t the tax rate at any given level per se. The problem is bigger than that, and there are myriad angles that could be discussed here, but I’ll focus on these two. One part of the problem is debt fueled spending that drives inflation, wiping out the monthly buying power of the citizenry, and then still demanding 8-15% of their income to finance that very same debt driven spending. The second part of the problem is the method and implementation of the tax system itself, and the expense of that implementation and enforcement.

The problem is not disparity in taxing the rich vs the poor, the problem is in the expenses of the government and whether or not the expenses that system requires is bringing fair value to the citizenry. As long as our overall governmental expenses are greater than the income collected through taxation, inflation will secretly steal away value from everyone. Changes in tax rate, at any tier, won’t cure this. At current spending levels, no amount of taxation would cover the expenses of operating our government in any one year.

Eliminating hundreds of billions worth of expenses that are incurred due to the methods and implementation of our tax code would go a long way to getting those overall general expenses under control, allowing for less overall spending, lowering inflationary pressure, and lowering the tax burden on everyone, especially those most vulnerable who are on a fixed income.

Paying taxes is never an exciting and happy feeling thing to do. But it is a necessary evil in a cohesive and generally organized society. However, the taxes aren’t currently paying for the orderly execution of social needs. In fact, they barely cover the interest on the debt, so bankers managing that debt can profit billions, and CPA’s can profit billions, while fixed income pensioners send four figure checks to the IRS in some sort of financial sacrificial ritual. Being able to keep that $4000 would change that pensioner’s life for that quarter, but instead, it becomes barely a molecule of debt service once paid into the banker’s slush fund.

At this micro level, we have to be able to see how letting the citizen keep the money is the only answer. The citizen would need less assistance, cutting down on the need for social services, lowering the need for ever larger tax receipts, and allowing us to reduce the cost of government further, bringing inflation under control so that buying power in the middle and lower classes could stabilize, allowing low-income and fixed income citizens to maintain a basic living standard without further eroding their ability to provide for themselves.

We need to see that first laundering a citizen’s money through the accounting, banking, and federal bureaucracy to then provide that citizen with the “help they need” is preposterous. In no system, imaginary or otherwise, can that be a more efficient and cost-effective way of getting services to a citizen. Stop taking their money and they won’t need so much help. Stop deficit-spending our dollar into oblivion and the citizen won’t need so much help.

And for goodness’ sake, quit taxing the pensioners. It’s just payola to the CPA industry and an obvious Ponzi triangle of financial shell games between CPAs, federal bankers, and the government bureaucrats that protect them, and who profit alongside them at our expense. If those who profit from this system can keep the rubes distracted by arguing over marginal rates, the entire charade can continue unchecked, profiting the connected to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, and fleecing the public, like sheep, every April.

 

Electric Cars are the CFL Bulb of Automotive History

 
"So inefficient, so toxic, and so inconvenient are electric cars that no one wants them. They are not books to scrolls or cell phones to landlines, the electric car is a CFL bulb. Over engineered, inconvenient, toxic, and not readily adopted because the technology it is attempting to replace is known to be more reliable, more convenient, less toxic, and generally speaking, more affordable." 

Recently, Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary of the US government, compared people who are slow to adopt electric car technology to people unwilling to give up their landlines in favor of a cell phone.

This comparison is an excellent jumping off point to discuss the real problem with slow adoption of the electric car.

When a new product emerges on the market, once word has gotten round of the product’s existence, the people of the earth make the final judgement on whether or not that product is useful and effective. We no longer carry around scrolls, for example, because books turned out to be more useful for carrying information on the printed page. One doesn’t need to unroll their fifteen-foot scroll to find a specific passage, you simply turn to the correct page and there is your passage. Books were such an improvement over their predecessor the scroll, that adoption was rapid and unfettered. No global mandate was required for us to abandon our use of scrolls and begin using books instead. The new product was a superior product. Human beings, being very adept at recognizing efficiency and improvement in their immediate and daily existence, picked up the book with rapid acceptance. The scroll became an artifact. No mandate required. Just a better product.

As Pete pointed out, cell phones happened in a similar way. At first, they were a bit pricey, but even people who couldn’t afford one saw their utility, and as soon as the price came down, pretty much everyone bought one. Land lines began fading soon thereafter, and though the technology still exists and can be accessed, few people avail themselves of it, the cell phone basically killed off the landline in almost all cases. And again, there was no mandate, there was never a government demand that everyone ditch their landlines and instead pick up cell phones.

How is this possible then that everyone made the change without a government mandate? Well, that’s because cell phones are a better product. Everyone could see that. You didn’t need to propagandize people to make them believe cell phones were better, the cell phone was actually a better version of a phone. Anyone could see that being able to take your phone with you was going to free up untold amounts of time and allow for a more mobile population. This was appealing to people, so they adopted it. No mandate needed. Just a better product.

Sometimes, new technology arrives on the scene and it isn’t immediately and broadly adopted, even after the best efforts of central planners to encourage adoption. Many of you reading this will have the evidence of this type of historical error in judgment in your garage junk drawers: the CFL bulb.

The compact fluorescent bulb was hailed as the savior of the planet when it was first brought to market. The citizens of the world were going to save energy, save money, and save the planet by switching from those inefficient incandescent bulbs to the more efficient CFL bulb. So purifying and uplifting was this environmental cure that we began to divert our tax dollars to subsidize the purchase of the CFL bulb. Why did they need to be subsidized? Well, the cost of manufacturing a CFL bulb was orders of magnitude higher than manufacturing an incandescent bulb. Incandescent bulbs, on the other hand, are cheap to make because they are simple, using simple materials, requiring minimal energy inputs to produce. CFL bulbs carried in their chassis a mini ballast, highly technical glass manufacture, and of course, toxic gas. Never mind that those who decided to compel a shift from incandescent to CFL bulbs don’t generally consider the input energy and materials needed to manufacture a CFL bulb when they calculate how much “energy” such a bulb will “save.” Manufacturers were compelled to switch products, even to the point of incandescent bulbs being outright banned, putting bulb manufacturers out of business and leaving their employees looking for work. In this way, the CFL bulb was effectively mandated (though replaced by the LED bulb before the ban came into effect).

But why did the CFL bulb need to be subsidized, mandated, and have its competition literally banned from production? Wasn’t it better tech? Why didn’t the people adopt it immediately and with joy?

CFL bulbs sucked. That’s why. The light they emitted was sickly, the length of time they took to warm up was unlivable, and to top it all off, if you broke one you had to call in a hazmat team because these new environmentally friendly bulbs were actually full of toxic gas. That’s why you still have some in your junk drawer, because you can’t just put them in the trash, and the recycle centers are inconveniently located, so we all have these permanent, fragile, toxic residents in our junk drawers and garage cupboards because we’re trying to save the planet!

This is the same future that awaits the electric car. So inefficient, so toxic, and so inconvenient are electric cars that no one wants them. They are not books to scrolls or cell phones to landlines, the electric car is a CFL bulb. Over engineered, inconvenient, toxic, and not readily adopted because the technology it is attempting to replace is known to be more reliable, more convenient, less toxic, and generally speaking, more affordable. And just like the CFL bulb, the electric car is being enabled through subsidies, mandates, and the abolition of competition, and even still, people aren’t buying it. It’s not that people are slow to adopt electric cars because they are too dumb to see the advantages. The electric car is not being adopted because the people are too smart to fall for such useless and expensive tech. People aren’t adopting electric cars because electric cars suck. Just like the CFL bulb.

Now, if you like torque and rapid launches, then electric cars are for you. No one can deny the incredible torque and launch times electric cars can achieve. But that’s not how the electric car is being marketed in the main. We are being told that the electric car is the future because it is more environmentally friendly. This is wholly and entirely poppy-cock. There is not one single thing about an electric car that is more environmentally friendly than a gas car. Not one thing.

There are lots of folks who buy electric cars because they are perennially in 2^nd or 3^rd place in the unending race against the proverbial Joneses. The fancy polished plastics and glittering widescreen tv in the dash bedazzles them into thinking they are modern and stylish for driving around in what amounts to a near-future heap of toxic waste. Like the CFL bulb, our yards and driveways will eventually be littered with inoperable electric cars, as they prove too expensive to maintain and too costly to recycle, they’ll sit like toxic bulbs in our junk drawers, slowly disintegrating into microplastics, and always remaining a terrifying fire hazard.

The electric car is not cut out to replace the gas car. There are a few uses here and there where an electric vehicle might make sense, so I see no reason to ban them as an option, but the people of the earth can see through the façade they’re being sold. No one wants to be trapped in the path of a hurricane awaiting a charging station. Anyone who has been without power for more than a couple days knows that in a post storm scenario, gas products work, electric products don’t, period, full stop. Gas products work, electric products don’t.

But aren’t electric cars more environmentally friendly when it comes to CO2 emissions? Well, they effectively move the production of CO2 from the tailpipe to some other location, either a power plant, or a windmill or solar panel manufacturing facility. It doesn’t reduce anything, but it does shift it to a different location. I will caution anyone concerned about the quality and cleanliness of the environment to try not to maintain a myopic focus on reducing the quantity of a life affirming gas in our atmosphere that allows plants and animals to flourish on earth. If, in your concern for reducing this harmless and life giving gas, you are willing to strip mine cobalt and lithium in massive pit mines using child slave labor, pour massive concrete foundations in previously arable farm land to support toxically manufactured windmills that produce less energy than they required for manufacture, leaving toxic solar panels strewn about the once beautiful countryside, leaching toxic silicates into the soil as they deteriorate, then maybe you have mixed up your priorities a bit. You aren’t going to save the planet through manufacturing. You’re not going to save the planet by building out new infrastructure. Extruding more plastics and strip mining more toxic heavy metals will never save the planet.

The electric car is either a short-term profit center for enterprising marketeers who will not be on the hook for dealing with the mass of toxic waste their products will have created before the public finally notices their being sold a Betamax, or, they’re a totalitarian government’s wet dream, in which no one can travel freely unless granted access to the electrical grid.

Gas cars are better. In every way. They provide more freedom, they are less toxic, drilling for oil is far less destructive to the environment than mining for battery commodities, gas cars can be worked on and repaired more easily, and maintaining a running car for many years is the most efficient way to maintain a car. Buying new cars every couple of years is the least environmentally friendly thing you can do. An electric car only becomes more efficient than a gas car after the 300,000^th mile. Try to find a used electric car that has that many miles on it.

Stop trying to make electric cars happen. They’re inefficient, toxic, and less reliable long term than any current internal combustion technology. If electric cars were better than gas cars, we’d all buy them within a year. It’s been a couple decades now that they’ve been trying to force electric cars down our throats and we simply don’t want them. To the Pete Buttigieg’s of the world, it’s not because we’re too dumb, it’s because we’re not falling for it. We’re actually able to discern a better product from an inferior product. Electric cars are an inferior product that are less environmentally friendly than gas cars when their whole lifespan is taken into consideration. Electric cars may relocate CO2 emissions from the tailpipe to the power plant (or the Chinese solar panel manufacturing facility), but for the tradeoff of re-locating our CO2 emissions we are asked to give up too much. We don’t like the risk of being stranded, we don’t like that we’re more likely to need a new car sooner, we don’t like that we’ll be more dependent on FEMA after a storm event, the list goes on and on. But mainly, we don’t like being told an outright lie: that there is something environmentally friendly about electric cars.

Human beings can analyze cost and benefit quite well when either their pocketbook or their safety is on the line. Electric cars make us less safe, cost more, and are more destructive long run to the environment. It’s time to park electric cars in our junk drawers so we, as a society, can move on. A more efficient tech likely exists, but to find it, we need to first stop spinning our wheels on the dead-end street of electric cars.

Is Public Education an Arm's Length Transaction?

Why does the general population seem so ignorant to the big lie of government? The biggest reason is that most everyone garners their knowledge of “how things work” through some level of “education” vis a vis the public school system.

There are the private schools of course, but really a small percentage of the population is privately educated. Not the least part of which is due to the constant struggle parents face when trying to free up their tax dollars from special interest control so they can take their child to the school of their choice. The Government, and its employee unions, have no use for privatized education, and fight to maintain control of that money for their approved school system with tooth and nail. Which school system does the government sponsor? The public school system of course, the one they control the curriculum for, the one that teaches exactly what the government needs everyone to believe so that they can perpetuate the great lie of government.

Doesn’t it scare the heck out of anyone else that citizens are placed into, indeed in some cases required by law to attend, an “education system” that perpetuates a curriculum designed and approved by the same people that we are supposed to vote for and then pay our taxes to? That must be the single greatest scam any history book could tell. It is definitely a most horrific abuse of power. The con is pulled off so well, that without making a terrific effort to seek out opposing views, most people who have been through the system actually stand up and fight for it. A sort of Stockholm Syndrome.

The very concept of a “public school” is just as scary to me as a “religious government.”

Home of the Slaves?

When you type a phrase into a search engine, are you seeking information, or is the search engine seeking information? Both right?

You see, if we compare the internet to a stereo system, it has recently become clear, web sites like Google are viewed as speakers, telling us all the information we want to know, however, in reality, web sites like Google are actually microphones, recording everything about you.

This is not news. It has always been true that typing phrases into search engines was akin to sharing your secrets with the world, and that world would use your secrets to sell you stuff you might need. For me, even though I found the data mining distasteful, it was so darn convenient that it was hard not to get involved. What helped me get over my concern of being recorded was the person doing the recording was just trying to do business. Provide me with services I want, and profit from it.

Now that has all changed. Now the microphone is being employed by the Government, to record the actions of it’s citizens, and probably has been all along. And that government is also trying to do it’s business, but that business is not a mutually beneficial exchange. The potential for social control through campaign shenanigans, opposition censorship, and midnight disappearances is too great for comfort.

For decades, I have had friends sound very paranoid about their cellphones and laptops, concern over the cameras and microphones being used to record their activities always seemed somewhat paranoid if not plausible. Now it is known as a fact, proving once again that just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

My third grade teacher, Mrs. Anoni, she was the first one to teach us about the evils of Soviet Russia. Of course, this was during the waning years of the cold war, so it was a hot topic to discuss how poorly their country was run and how well our country was run. I wonder how that plays in third grade classrooms now? Mrs. Anoni taught us about the failures of communism, the lines for toilet paper, the one color shoe selection, etc. But most of all, she taught us about the KGB, and how it surveiled it’s citizens, how it wasn’t safe to speak out against the government, how citizens were encouraged to turn in their family and friends for speaking out against the government, you know, like China now, and North Korea, and now, like the US.

The Land of the Free used to be just that. It was only a few years ago that I never really considered the government actually spying on it’s citizens. Now as I type this, I not only worry, but I know full well that somewhere in a dark office, some Bush/Obama crony is monitoring every keystroke. I loved The Land of the Free, I believed in The Land of the Free. I believe we can still get back there, but this administration is clearly not interested in the The Land of the Free, but more interested in The Home of the Slaves. Any person who tries to defend this administrations increasing intrusions on American’s birthright of freedoms is complicit with the police state and will only realize their folly once they realize the microphone is pointed at them too.

Disrespect, Capitalism, and Honey Bees

I just had the pleasure of reading some thoughts from a gentleman my sister recently met. He was very forthcoming with his beliefs and I found it quite interesting. I must thank him for helping me distill a thought I have been working on for a long time.
He was discussing how mutual respect is what is missing from our society and then extrapolated that to condemn our capitalist system as exploitive and disrespectful, and then went on to explain how true disrespect was assuming that one person has power over another person, and that one person knows better what the other person needs.
I wish I could find the right way, the perfect words to explain to him the reality of his thoughts, and I will attempt to do so here.


I fully agree, it is very disrespectful to assume that you or anyone else knows better what someone else’s life might need. That is very very true. But I am eternally confused as to why so many people, typically on the left of the political landscape, then take that truth and apply it to capitalism. If you want an example of pure disrespect of people’s individual rights, if you want to see pure narcissistic contempt for people ‘less than’ the elite, if you want to study how through the ages of man, people have been subjugated by those that feel they ‘know better’, the proper place to look is to the left. This current administration is an excellent example, but Wilson and FDR, are even better examples because they were actually successful in their narcissistic attempts to ‘better peoples lives’ in their own image. Since the times of the Kings and the Kahns till the communists, and in many lands today run by dictatorship, it is precisely the liberal socialist style agenda that claims intellectual superiority over the common man, and subjugates the common man to live under what the elites in power claim to be in the common man’s best interest.

Capitalism has been the only socio-economic system that eliminated the power position of the elites and allowed the common man to take control of his or her own destiny. It is scary though I suppose, and maybe that is why so many people refuse to see this reality. Once you are responsible for yourself… you are responsible for yourself! Fail? That was all you. But fear of the unknown is what allowed so many centuries of centralized leadership. People shouldn’t focus on how scary it is to fail, but how exuberant of a life one lives when they try, fail and eventually succeed.

The real interesting part about the “capitalism is slavery” argument, is that people seem very confused about history when discussing ‘the new way’ or ‘the old way’. Many people on the left ardently argue that we need to move forward, into a future where we are a perfect socialist system, but they completely ignore that the socialist style system they are trumpeting is older than any government. Collectivist feudalism is no goal, it is actually capitalism that set man free from bondage. Capitalism is actually the new and promising way. We can study hundreds, nay, thousands of years of centralized planning. We have little more than two centuries of capitalism as a social construct to analyze.

That being said, I would like to expand on this concept in a more natural way. Capitalism is not only the most respectful, fair and non-enslaving system to ever exist, it is actually the most natural and organic economic structure ever implemented. The cycles of nature themselves are capitalistic. All elements of nature work to support each other without ever sitting down and discussing how it is going to be structured. It is all entirely voluntary trade, just like capitalism. The bees don’t demand the flowers provide pollen, the flowers and bees have a voluntary relationship. Just like capitalism. Now, if you are just going to skim over that concept and complain about it, instead of considering its weight, I would like to add, yes, the bees themselves do act in a socialized manner, but, and this is a big but, the bees can function that way because they have a single goal. The entire population is focused on just one goal. This is never true of humans. Maybe in times of national unity we have similar notions on a certain subject, but at any given time, there are as many goals as there are people. The only way to allow those people to achieve their goals is to allow them to interact with each other voluntarily. Capitalism.

It is so interesting to me to hear people discuss capitalism like it is some evil construct (especially by people very interested in the natural course of the world) when capitalism is actually the only natural state of an economy, and the only respectful way for each person to strive to achieve their goals.

Now, I recognize that many will argue and point out the flaws and catastrophes brought about by capitalism. I will have to agree on certain counts, although I will usually point out the subversive socialist government program that skewed the natural playing field and caused a perverse incentive to alter the otherwise natural course of capitalism. But beyond that, it is important to remember, that nature itself is flawed and allows for catastrophe in many ways. It is even part of the natural cleansing process of the earth’s systems to clear away with catastrophe. My point being, no economic system is perfect and will ever protect every single element of the system. The lion must eat. The river must flood. That is not disrespectful or unfair, it is the natural course. What is disrespectful and ‘unfair’ is someone standing up and declaring that they know best when the lion should eat and how deep the river should rise.

Under any socialist style system, like the one we struggle to succeed under here in the United States, there is little that is voluntary. Socialists and the liberals who pretend not to be socialists, don’t believe in voluntary trade, they believe they know better how the exchanges should occur. That, my friend, is disrespectful.

Krugman, Princeton, and the death of America

In a recent article about the Great Depression, it's parallels to our current situation, and what should be done about it, Mr. Krugman made a few assertions that don’t bode well for the state of independent academics or our country in general. One would think that an institution such as Princeton would want to be represented by forward thinking individuals, not just shills for failed public policy. Does anyone still consider Krugman an economist? Or just a sideshow player for the liberal agenda? Is he really still hawking Keynesian theories as prescriptions for economic success? Seriously, this is what kids are learning at Princeton? If this is the highest education available, no wonder the country is in a death spiral.

The points Krugman attempted to assert, in his typical holier than thou tone, were not just childishly wrong, but completely at odds with each other. And it’s not just Krugman, I have read similar drivel from many liberal pundits. The points are: The stimulus failed because it wasn’t big enough. And Without a great war to force the spending needed, we will wallow in depression without a foreseeable end. OK, lets look at those two statements. Just real quick. They’re so ignorant that they don’t deserve much time.

Stimulus wasn’t big enough? OK, Keynes, haven’t you wreaked enough havoc on the world yet? Still haven’t brought it down completely, eh? The three biggest expenses of the US government (that is, the US taxpayer), in order from largest to smallest (smallest, in a trillion dollar sort of way) are:

1. Health and Human Services

2. Miltary spending

3. Interest on our national debt.

The annual interest on our debt is greater than the annual budgets for the departments of education, veteran affairs, agriculture, and NASA, combined. You could actually throw in a few more government programs if you wanted to get really close.

So, are we to assume that even more interest payments would allow us to fund these other programs in the long run? Or just through the next election cycle?

The whole lie of Keynesian economics is in the “multiplier.” We all know the claim: a dollar actually equals a dollar sixty if the government spends it, whereas it is only a dollar in the private sector. This is the most ridiculous assertion one could make about the realities of economics. How much does it cost for the private entity to calculate how much to give the government? How much does it cost for three dozen bureaucracies to process that dollar? How much is the interest on that dollar if it wasn’t a tax dollar? How much do the politicians that beg for that dollar take for themselves to fly around, wine and dine their favored constituents, and campaign for re-election? (Bush and Obama are responsible for millions of our dollars going to their own political agendas while threatening to lay off fire fighters, teachers and police!)

A dollar doesn’t equal a dollar sixty more, it probably costs a dollar sixty for the government to collect a dollar. Anyone calling themselves an economist that still purports some kind of Keynesian multiplier as a solution must in some way be on the government coat tail.

The only reason true economics, Austrian Economics, is ignored in political circles, is because it is too realistic, and doesn’t allow for bully pulpit promises of how the government can help, if only we give them more of our money.

The second statement Krugman made that caught my attention, and I’ll be even quicker on this one, was regarding the need of a great war to bring us out of the doldrums.

I don’t know if the guy is just truly an idiot, or if he just didn’t read his own argument, or if he thinks his readers are such idiots that they can’t connect two dots.

When faced with accusations of overspending, the current administration and its supporters very quickly, and rightly, point out the un-paid-for spending of the Bush administration as some sort of salve for why it’s OK that Obama has tripled that amount. Health care, for example, they say is a worthy reason for unsustainable debt, but ‘Bush’s Wars’ were not. Obama trumpets as often as he can that the real reason we are in this mess was because of Republican’s relentless spending on War. - Did he say, War? - You mean War like the kind Krugman wants to help us out of Depression 2.0? How can war simultaneously be the reason for our problems and the solution?

Will someone please get this pseudo economist out of the public discourse. Princeton? New York Times? Anyone?

Mr Krugman is one more nail in the coffin of that silly little Nobel thingy.

Why socialism is so popular with governments, and such a failure throughout history.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

The failure is built right into the manifesto.

From each according to his ability, that’s fine, that’s actually natural, capitalistic even. It’s the ‘to each according to his need’ part that seeds the failure in the system. Harmless enough on the surface, it is easy to fall victim to such a utopic ideal, but let’s focus on the word Need.

Need is not a concrete term. You can not build a philosophy on a meaningless word, especially when the philosophy is meant to govern and better the lives of a diverse and dynamic population.

Who’s need?

That's the obvious question, to which of course the creed answers, “each persons need.”

Individually?

Each person?

That's a very nice idea, but a little childish in it's simplicity. The question it leaves unanswered is “who decides who Needs what?”

This is why socialism and communism, (Marx himself recognized that socialism was only a side track on the road to communism) are so popular with governments. It is the same reason why Keynesian economics, a terribly flawed concept, is so popular with governments. As with socialism, governments love to sell it as the answer for one simple reason. It gives the government a role in society. It gives them the opportunity to be our savior. And hence, get our votes.

It is one thing to be a governor, sitting in a big room, being the governor. But there isn’t much power in sitting. One must engage the citizenry, point out their flaws, and offer ‘solutions’ by their own hand (with our money of course). Otherwise, we the people will just busy our selves with making business and lifestyles out of thin air for ourselves. We would likely only approach the ‘authorities’ when some line of conduct had been breached by one or more of us. We would tell the authorities what displeased us, and they would act to restrain said activity. But that would be far to passive for any practicing political narcissist.

The way it is presently, and ever more persistently, the authorities are in our face daily, telling us what we are doing wrong, and how they are going to fix us, stealing our ability to make lives for ourselves, and claiming they are trying to help. That is a far more powerful position for those we call politicians. It is not suitable to the narcissism of a politician to simply wait for issues to come up.

It was clear in Obama’s Farewell Iraq speech, when he steered way off subject and began campaigning to basically say, “my job is to fix you.” That should make it clear that he and many involved in government today see their role as doctor of all ills. Whatever the issue, they think they have the power to do something about it, and act with impunity to enact such reforms as necessary to further establish their control over the situation, as it slowly falls apart further.

But why? Why does it fall apart further the more they try to control it? Don’t they have the best intentions?

Well, their intentions are debatable, but that is not the point of this article. There is a very specific reason centralized decision making fails in all accounts. One person can not make 300 million decisions, each second, 24 hours a day. 300 million interchanging decisions each with infinite potential. That is why man remained in bondage until capitalism (the natural existence of man and nature) was nurtured into a social frame work.

From feudal England to Castro’s Cuba, whenever one man, woman, or elite group of men and women as we face now, attempts to manage a diverse and dynamic socio-economic body, the machine runs inefficiently, leading to rationing and shortages at first, and then later to despotism and possibly even land clearances at the expense of millions of lives. As in Stalin’s case, when you find you can’t govern such a large body politic, you simply have to massacre many of them, so you have a better shot at managing the remnants.

Each person has a very different idea of what they need. As soon as you decide that you know better what someone else needs, you have introduced despotism into the system. Despotism leads to collapse. Always has.

The only way to distribute the needs of the people is by doing so ‘to each according to their own ability’. Marx should have just combined his maxim and stopped there.

How about a new manifesto: “To each according to their own ability and charity towards your fellow man.”

Government as God through Science

As the government uses the public education system to promote the sciences, it inherently degrades the importance of spiritual principles in the mind of it's people.

This is not an accident.

Facts are fleeting and entirely corruptible depending on who is in power. The more a person is led from "feeling" to "fact", the less morally upright a people they become, leading to a less independent people more easily led into slavery.

The very freedom of our country was founded on ethics and personal responsibility not found in any government scripture prior to America’s founding, but through far more spiritual guidance. Once the spirit is squelched, once dependence on government is thoroughly established, there is very little that can arrest the snowball into feudalism.

Controlling our health care, re-distributing our production, dictating our education. The real battle between rich and poor does not exist on the battlefield of corporate soil, the greatest war is being waged between the political elite and the working man, all the while, without their own moral compass, the working man champions the government as their savior.

The rule of one man over another has become the goal of our government, forcing people only to unite in cause behind armies of lawyers and lobbyists to exert power and extort freedoms from one class or another for one cause or another. The idea of making your own world work for you is being purposefully eradicated from the American psyche through the use and support of labor unions, social services, protectionist rulings, public education, and an ever increasing bible of laws-of-man, whose sole purpose is to restrict the rights of one for the benefit of another.

Religion has played many parts throughout history, some dark and some enlightened, I do not propose that organized religion is some cure all, it isn't. I am talking about spirituality and the ethics that come with a higher understanding of our place in the universe. In today’s world, the ethics of personal responsibility are being forced out of existence by a pseudo nanny state who uses its entrenched “public service” systems to fool us into believing it is working for us, all the while enslaving us, one law at a time.

With our moral compass purposely being eradicated by the entrenched elites, we are losing the precious and short lived American experiment of freedom and personal responsibility that led people of many nations to the promise of freedom, a promise we now willingly give up in hopes of some great king that will take away the fear and responsibility of being free.

Wages of Power

Not only does the minimum wage not help whom it is intended to help, it actually hurts their prospects at finding a job. It also hurts those that have already found success beyond government mandated minimums. Lets look at the ‘evil’ corporation for example. If a chain of burger joints, (one that has been deemed evil let's say) is so evil and profiteering that they are only focused on their profit margin, wouldn’t it stand to reason that they would charge as much as possible for their burgers? You know, really stick it to everyone, just get every penny they could? Maybe $20, or $30 dollar burgers?

By the standard of the pro-government, pro-union, pro-minimum wage folks, that should be exactly what they are doing. But they can’t, there is this little thing called competition.

As of yet, the government does not run all business. They are using the current economic downturn to try and accomplish as much of that as possible, but at this point, there is still competition… therefore, even the ‘evilest’ of burger joints can only garner a certain price point for their burger, because if they could charge more, by the very nature of their evilness, they would.

Now, let's force them to pay their employees more, with either a government mandated minimum wage, or through a government protected union sponsored contract “negotiation." With these false price pressures, in the face of a now globally competitive market, any company, from a burger joint to a car manufacturer will have only three choices: raise the price of burgers, find technology to replace the now overpriced worker (if the union will let them), or close up shop and send everyone home. No one in their right mind would operate for any foreseeable period at a loss (proving again that government is not in its right mind).

So with the newly instituted wage increase, either the price of Things, everything, not just burgers, remember it is a mandatory minimum, goes up to cover the difference and keep everyone working, but now with less purchasing power because even though they make more, everything costs more, or, the company seeks out and implements some new technology that can do the job cheaper and people get laid off, or the company goes out of business and everyone gets laid off.

How will that help anyone raise their standard of living?

The only possible good answer is that once replaced by technology, the workers can now advance into a more lucrative and rewarding career, perhaps working for the new company that displaced their old job, but that is only likely for those earning the minimum wage that should have been: students and immigrants. These groups arrive, begin to work, and grow into greater things. Someone who has never amounted to more than minimum wage, even as those around them have moved on, or someone who has no desire to do anything more than the union wage contract said they had to do, if they are not willing to step up into job training or re-education, they will not be benefited by this technology displacement, they will simply go on the dole.

This is the best outcome possible from falsely standardized wages.

The most likely outcome is a short honeymoon for the politician that promised the new wage pressure, and then more inflation for everyone else, everywhere. And no new buying power for anyone the new wage was meant to help.