Morals and Ethics, Health Care and Government

The disaster that is Obamacare continues to point to the ever widening problems of having a government attempt to impose its own idealistic ideas of what the process is of providing health care, which is not the same as 'health insurance', runs into obstacles where simple ideology driven bureaucratic rules and regulations run up against the common man and his enterprises.  Of the most concerning is the attempt to impose regulations mandating coverage of abortion and 'birth control' upon diverse groups who have religious teachings that make those immoral practices.  They are not just immoral for oneself but, to hold true to their religious teachings, it is immoral to support these services in any real way.  Thus the first of many suits, and truly it should be a class action suit, is one by Hobby Lobby that refuses to obey the power of government over religious principles in their common enterprise Hobby Lobby.  I'll use a Hot Air article as it is where I left some commentary and I will give that to you in an unvarnished way:

Religion is the observation of holding oneself to account to set of beliefs that have real world practice attached to them. Corporeal individuals may not have that transgressed by mere human law as the observance and practice is to a higher moral authority than any government can ever hope to be. The corporate entity is a voluntary association of individuals under a set of agreements and, as such, may have religion as their basis in practice and observation which includes a moral code and doctrine behind it.

No one is forcing employees to work at a such a concern that has such requirements and performs such practices. Even if you disagree with them and sign up to the corporation, you are not allowed to enforce your belief system upon the others in the voluntary cooperation out of respect for their beliefs. If you want to be employed by a place that offers you services that don’t have such restrictions then go find them, you are not forced to work at a concern that does not share your practices nor your beliefs.

I have my own problem with corporate entities, but they tend to dwell in the realm of duration and lack of finality of them when they allow, abet and encourage criminal activities amongst its members to the benefit of the corporate entity. Three Strikes and you’re out would be a start to ending such abuse, but that is a far different thing than the internal practices that are not criminal in nature and adhere to a known set of moral standards that the company upholds for those voluntarily associating with it.

Where does the government get off telling a corporate or corporeal entity that they must support practices that are considered immoral by their belief system? Those who abjure such practices are not in any way, shape or form utilizing them and if others wish to do so then let them PAY FOR IT based on some other agreements but do not force those who hold a higher standard to paying for something which they consider to be immoral in the extreme.

This doesn’t stop at the corporate level and paying for abortion and contraceptive access is that camel’s nose under the tent sort of deal. What if some fine grandee of a bureaucrat gets through required euthanasia of the old, the sick or the mentally ill? Not just paying for ‘access’ to it, which in and of itself has extreme moral problems attached to it due to the way that bureaucrats are stretching ‘voluntary’ to become involuntary… if government becomes the arbiter of morality, then we have truly lost our way as it is only fit to punish things that are immoral that physically effect individuals and STOP THEM and PUNISH those who commit such acts. When you force individuals to support things they consider immoral, then where can it draw the line on ANY OTHER act? I have seen governments of men, not of law, and I want nothing, whatsoever, to do with them. And that is coming into sharp focus today more so than at any other time in our history.

ajacksonian on November 29, 2013 at 10:18 AM

All of Obamacare is about substituting the good sense of individuals in procuring methods of health care with that of government regulation, bureaucracy and punishment.  In the past century we have been witness to medical experimentation upon blacks without fully informing them of what they were signing up for, forced sterilization of the mentally ill at government institutions, and we currently have States that have regulations for euthanasia.  These are not questions of speculation but ones of fact done under government auspices, Federal and State, and at the behest of political doctrines and adherents who pushed for such things as eugenics, population control via abortion and sterilization, and having medical personnel 'assist' in suicide.  These are, one and all, moral wrongs in so many religions held by so many believers that it is not funny.  Yet that these things happened is a fact of our history in this Nation and demonstrates the evils of government willing to take expedient means towards ideological ends to the detriment of its citizens.

The Hobby Lobby case is not just about this one corporation, a collection of private citizens chartering a company to do certain legal activities in a voluntarily cooperative manner run by owners who have a belief system that requires their moral adherence to laws that come from a source other than Nature or mere civil government.  To have freedom of expression is not just in expressing oneself verbally but through activities and actions that follow in a given line of conscience that comes from no source under government or Nature's control.  Forming a company to serve the public in certain venues by believers and then running it in accordance with their belief system is freedom of expression and religion, both.

When government seeks to impose its power over the individual and begin to dictate practices that one holds as immoral, then ethics require that those mere civil laws not be followed so as to be true to eternal moral laws handed down from the highest power of God.  It matters not if God is the singular, the plural or a vague understanding of the morality behind the universe and life itself, that one believes in it and is true to it in their daily lives which hinders none, harms none and is widely understood puts this case into a full Amendment I application: freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of expression and freedom of free association amongst one's fellow citizens.

Civil Government is without wisdom and has problems even finding out what it did last week or last year, not to speak of what it has done decades ago.  It is not a thinking being but a freely made construct amongst the people of a Nation or State to do common activities for the defense and protection of all and, in the case of the US, to stay away from all matters of morals and ethics in following moral practices.  Government itself is a Punisher and necessary evil and not granted power to do good, but to punish the wicked and those who would disrupt society.  The good of society is from its citizens figuring out how to lead good, moral and ethical lives within mortal boundaries of income, savings, sustaining life, creating families, and creating communities in which we all seek to help each other and prosper in that doing. 

It is not immoral to seek to make a profit to sustain a company after paying one's workforce and providing them with agreed upon benefits.  It is not the icon of payment, not the coin or bill or credit exchange pieces, that are evil but only in the pursuit of same without thought to ensuring that it is gained via properly provisioned service or goods under payment contract.  In pursuit of money as its own end, there is no real good, but in pursuit of wealth which is accumulated by providing the best value at the lowest cost to one's fellow man and making a profit to expand such provisioning is true wealth beyond any dollar or penny hoarded.

Providing goods and services by individuals who hold a strict moral code and ethically abide by it is no sin and is not illegal.

Forcing such individuals to support immoral practices with forced payment into a system which requires such support: that is pure evil as it substitutes the power of government for the teachings of God.

And only death, destruction and chaos ever come from that.

Thin Red Line

This week we have been witness to an alleged Chemical Weapons (CW) attack in Syria, probably the second or third such attack since President Obama put his 'red line' to work during the last election campaign to make himself sound good and strong on National Defense.  This was after Libya, which crossed no lines of using CW, and which the US and Europeans supported with arms and logistical supplies.  Of the things we delivered to Libyan rebels were US made MANPADs that have gone missing and appear to have been transferred to the Syrian 'rebels', mostly al Qaeda organization types either from AQ itself or AQ in the Magreb.  Added on to that is that the Syrian 'rebels' from AQ have also gotten their hands on CW stores of the regime at outlying bases and you now have two sides armed with CW capability.

A final part of this mix is Hezbollah which tested out Surface to Surface Missiles (SSM) and Iranian copies of the anti-ship Silkworm Missile, the latter used against an civilian cargo freighter and an Israeli Destroyer.  Thus there is a whole panoply of weapons available amongst all the parties involved, not to speak of the improved SCUDs that Syria has and the rumored Bio Weapon program that got kicked off when dual-use equipment was delivered to Syria in the '90s to help it make a pharmaceuticals industry which then shut down after the equipment was delivered.  Syria has a long line of backers going back decades which include: USSR/Russia, China, North Korea and its main backer, Iran.

Thus we are left with a specter of both sides having access to CWs and the entire Syrian conflict devolving into an artillery battle (with some SSM components also held by both sides because the regime had such weapons at outlying bases as well), and one in which one side has no air wing and the other side has one but is faced with an array of US and Libyan made MANPADs which threaten to neutralize not just fixed wing assets but rotary wing assets, as well.

Back in 2006 I did a review of the known Syrian weapons sites and what they looked like from Open Source INTEL to get a handle on just what it was that Syria had in-place at the time.  I've since looked at other imagery near al-Baida and seen what looks to be the rumored site of where Saddam's WMD programs ended up in Syria and it is typical of its other sites: some military surface emplacements and then indications of a larger underground structure , in the case of al-Baida, inside a mountain.  This is not only not unusual for Syria, but with its associations with NoKo and its expertise with having one of the most heavily dug in military systems on the planet, Syria most likely has put in defenses to thwart, divert or otherwise try to minimize the threat of 'bunker buster' bombs.  And as they had a good, close look at US capability in Iraq plus some INTEL coming via Iran from Af-Pak, Syria most likely has a good idea of the modern US capacity with such weapons.

Now comes President Obama's 'red line' being crossed and there are some essential questions to be asked, just on the military side of things.

1) Who has been using CWs in Syria?  Whenever you see photos of men with pails of chemicals to pour into an artillery shell, do realize that those are the oldest of the old shells in Syria.  They updated their CW capacity during the '70s by purchasing Spin Mix In Flight shell technology from Egypt which was supplied to them from the USSR.  So anyone using the old 'mix in pail and load' deal are most likely the lowest of the low end troops with old technology that was most likely at outlying bases, since you wouldn't want the modern shells to be used against you in a civil war... which this is, BTW, with outsiders trying take over, as well, in the form of AQ/AQIM.  It is easy enough to fake an artillery CW attack: just wait for an enemy artillery barrage and then mix some pails of chemicals, add some C-4 and blow them up in the craters or nearby.  This is a vital question as intervening against EITHER side means that the US is taking a PARTISAN SIDE in a civil war.  By damaging one side you help the other, which is the logic of old-style warfare like we are being handed in Syria.

2) If the point is to warn against using CW's, then why state just that [or even as what the President suggested in his proposed authorization document, all WMDs – added after initial post] ?  President George W. Bush gave the somewhat broad idea that getting rid of Saddam was to keep the world's worst weapons from the world's worst people.  That project is now a failure in Syria as that is precisely what is going on.  At this point AQ/AQIM must be assumed to have at least CW in its inventory to distribute to agents.  That is backed by the pre-OIF word from the Kurds that Saddam had trained AQ in CWs, and from our own CIA in Afghanistan where they found a site where AQ was using the Iraqi documents to create and test out CWs on animals and living human beings who were not volunteers.  Thus AQ has demonstrated knowledge, background and willingness to dabble in CWs and now have CWs in their inventory of available arms.  If President Obama's goal is to warn any Nation or organization (the much harder of the two to convince) that using CWs is off-limits, then why limit the attack to just CWs [or WMDs]?  Indeed, why use a conventional attack, at all?  The only way to make sure that the CW complexes, chemical facilities and actual source mines of phosphate are interdicted is not through conventional attacks, but with nuclear attacks.  That, of course, would just up the ante in the WMD game, but its still a hard chip to get access to even with nuclear proliferation... as long as Pakistan remains semi-stable, that is.  Or until Iran develops its own nuclear capacity.  Anything that leaves any of that infrastructure in place for the 'winner' means that you will have a CW capable State at the end of the conflict which, one would think, is just the opposite goal of what is being sought.

3) Attacking Syria would be easy if we hadn't PO'd the Israeli's, who have a demonstrated knowledge and capacity to take down Syrian (indeed just about anyone's) air defenses.  That still leaves us with the specter of US manned aircraft getting taken down with US made MANPADs that went to Libya and were transferred to the Syrian 'rebels'.  As I mentioned earlier these are not the only threats to be aware of, and SSM and anti-ship missile threats are also available to the Syrian regime and Hezbollah.  The dug-in nature of the Syrian main military sites, situated in regime strongholds, means that we cannot be assured of effectiveness of 'bunker buster' type bombs due to the passive and active defenses the regime has put in place due to Israeli capacity in that arena. 

Even if some of the weapons arrayed against US air and sea assets aren't the most modern, they do not have to be as a good number of them are man-portable or non-fixed site devices, which means that a feint against a ship would draw an air response that can then be met with a numerically high number of attacks.  Even stealth capacity is no proof against simple man-guided missiles and they won't even give you a lock-on warning, either.  Saddam was caught with his pants down because he expected the US to be thwarted for long months by Turkish duplicity and was lazily re-arranging his military to meet what he expected to be a long-way off US threat.  The Syrian regime is now given warnings of a date for decision and that will most likely be one of date of attack, as well.  Thus the chances of getting to and taking out arms that are the target goes down due to dispersal and defensive capabilities used to keep such arms, while other weapons (like SAM and MANPADS) get deployed to dissuade or take down US attacking aircraft.  While Syria is no virtual fortress like NoKo, it is a State with a major coastal mountain range, and mountain warfare is the 'great equalizer' against even the most sophisticated opponents. I looked at that in 2007 and anyone unfamiliar with what Mountain Warfare is might want to think about the topic.  Even though these are not the high mountains of Af-Pak, even the relatively low range in Syria has the same sorts of elements as are seen elsewhere and in other conflicts, and the US must take that to heart when going after any sort of hardened system set in a mountain range: Syria is not Libya, and the likelihood of getting a cruise missile into a cave opening will be much lower now that Syria knows the US has that capacity and has had decades to analyze it and prepare for such attacks.  If you wanted to take out Syria the time was way back when in Iraq when they were actively aiding and abetting the movement of terrorists into Iraq from Syria.  Too bad this President can't draw on that, huh?

4) Sectarian conflict is already going on in Syria between Shia and Sunni populations and, within the Shia population, between your average run of the mill types and the local Alawite sect which has its own teachings from Mohammed.  Consider them to be the LDS of Islam.  Being a minority of a minority (with Shia Islam around 10% of the population and the Alawite sect just 10% of that or 1% of the local population) and the specter of any US attack being cast as an attack against a religious minority raises its ugly head, as well.  The last thing the US needs on a regional basis is to raise sectarian conflicts to a bitter height by attacking one of them.  If we took the more even-handed approach that our allies took in Libya when all combatants took on the same garb and you couldn't tell regime from rebel from terrorist from civilian, then you might be able to make a case.  I dubbed that the 'Kill Them All' doctrine as it meant killing anyone who was fighting that you could set your sights on.  That, of course, would mean going after rebel caches of CWs as well... something we haven't heard about so far.  It's like the President wants to pick sides, pick winners, and not tell anyone that is what he is doing.  Oh, yes, that is because that IS what he is doing.

5) Finally, and this really should be heard out, if our aim is to help the 'defenseless civilian population' then why, oh why, aren't we planning to do that?  Really, if your goal is to preserve lives in a civil war where two sides (regime and 'rebels') are armed but the majority of the population (known as 'victims') aren't then why bother with either the regime or the 'rebels'?  A simple and much cheaper, plan is to buy up every AK from the global black market and air drop them by the pallet load to the civilian population.  Every town, village, farmhouse, collection of huts, places where people are seen living in caves, nomadic Bedouin, basically anyplace where you can find that isn't in control of the regime or 'rebels', should be well armed so that they aren't 'victims' any more.  If the idea is that the right to keep and bear arms is based on the fundamental positive liberty of warfare (self-defense) and the synthetic right to protect your property (gained by your liberty and thusly representative of your life's work), then this natural right is also a positive civil right and those deprived of arms when a war is ongoing (especially a 'respect no sides' civil war) are being offered up for slaughter.  If a well-armed society is a polite society and one likely to kill off hotheads, then isn't the place for this to be tested?  Syria has been a police State under one family for decades.  Civil rights, human rights and natural rights are abridged and abused there by both 'sides'.  And whoever 'wins' the civilian population loses.  If we really mean that we are about human liberty and freedom, and the right to not be abused by anyone, by no government and by no feral humans, then why not do the obvious and arm the civilian population and let THEM start to figure out what THEY WANT in the way of government?  Yes, that will make the conflict bloodier for a time, but a lot of that blood is going to the Tree of Liberty, not the Weed of Tyranny, and the end result will be something that the locals actually WANT.  Hey, it may be something horrific, right?  Yes.  Of course anyone wanting to do that must NOT PO the local population as it is well armed... and that is a much, much better state of affairs than has existed in Syria.  Ever.

Now for a few additional questions, but these are not about the military side of things.

Remember the 'anti-war coalition'?  You know the Leftist/Socialist/Code Pink/International Answer sewer groups?  Where are they?

I haven't heard from them since Obama has been elected.

They claimed to have such high morals and were against international conflicts because they impoverished people and took away from the goodie takings at home.  So where are these people?

You know the types that said we should have learned ever so much more about Iraq before going in?  Remember those people?  I do.

Where are they?

Why are they not organizing marches starting, well, right after Sec. State Kerrey delivered his asinine pabulum, but where were they yesterday?  OK, there might be a few Harley-Davidsons roaming around DC, but that shouldn't keep the stalwart defenders of their own moral certitude from doing anything.  Can't they get their collective heads out of their collective rectums to realize the smell they are getting is their own?

I don't call them the 'duplicitous Left' for nothing, you know.

And where are all those who tout 'international law' for everything going on as the answer?  They should be crying out for the sanctions provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention to be put into force!  OK, they may be stuck in Syria not signing on to that... but where is the outrage on THAT?  Shouldn't they be going to every other signatory State and pointing out that it has a MORAL DUTY TO ACT against a rogue regime using such weapons?  Oh, wait, that is silence I'm hearing from the 'international law' crowd.  So sorry, I thought you were serious about it.  'Duplicitous' doesn't even begin to cover them.

So where are all these high minded types of all stripes that came out of the woodwork for years on this topic?

Where are their morals?  Their courage to 'stand up to da Man'? Where is their rage against the system delivering eternal war?  Can't they even just run a pot luck dinner to get a few attendees anywhere?

Their lack of outrage now is their badge of cowardice, duplicity and lack of morals and ethics.  It is bad news for a 'movement' when the most scrupulous member of it is Cindy Sheehan who at least continued to criticize Obama for the same things she criticized Bush for.  She is yet another of the 50 Shades of Maroon, but she is a consistent shade, I'll give her that, but no less maroon for it.  President Obama and his Administration seem to want to get a corner on the Shades of Maroon market, and it appears to be working.  And 50 Shades of Maroon doesn't even begin to cover it.

A final thought.

Notice the political acumen to get this 'crisis' delayed long enough so that it hits the budget 'crisis' and the installment of Obamacare 'crisis', along with a nearing debt ceiling 'crisis'... and probably three or four more that I can't quickly remember... but isn't that such great timing?

Its like there is a plan behind it, or something.

Yet another of the 50 Shades of Maroon.

Nope, 50 is just not enough, methinks.

Misrule and privacy

Do you have a fundamental right to privacy?

That is to ask: do you have the fundamental right to have freedom and liberty in your movement, your personal information, your associates,  and your transactions without being watched over by government?  In the US there is an exception for being suspected of a crime and requiring a judge to issue a warrant to gather information on you, and that is only for a criminal investigation.  Roe v. Wade ruled that a woman had a right to privacy and that came from the 'emanations' and 'penumbra' of the US Constitution, not solidly rooting it in Amendments IX and X.  Your privacy, which is to say your freedom to conduct lawful business without the scrutiny of government and to have liberty in your own lawful affairs, is rooted in Amendments IX and X, not on the SCOTUS ruling of Roe v. Wade

Today we have two major sections of the US federal government that does not believe in your fundamental right to privacy and feel free to intrude on your affairs, capture data about you and do with it what they please:  DoJ and NSA.  Actually, the IRS has now demonstrated its want for your medical information to run Obamacare and has already seized medical records of millions of US citizens without their knowing about it.  In collecting this information without due process procedures in open court available for public scrutiny, the US government has, in fact, decided that you are subjects and no longer citizens.  Eric Holder's positions as Attorney General of the US is that you have no privacy in your e-mail or online activities, and yet you don't see him ready to put forward the entire DoJ archives of e-mail and traffic records that flow through the Internet from all the parts of DoJ.  Not all of it revolves around criminal investigation and mere administrative e-mails, which is to say procedural and fiduciary e-mails, should be open to the public on demand if AG Holder really means what he says.

Instead you are supposed to be transparent to the government and the government is to be opaque to you, the subject because you have not done the things necessary to remain a citizen.

Now if you think the NSA capture of metadata is benign and can explain why the NSA needs more record space than can hold the entire history of mankind, to date, up to five times over then may I ask: why?  Are you made more or less secure by this activity?  More importantly, if and when government uses such information to malign purposes, say quelling political discontent by some power hungry group or cabal, is your liberty secured or threatened by this data capture?

Do hold that thought for the exact, same question can be asked about the domestic wiretap information garnered by DoJ and your financial and medical records held by the IRS.  Are you safer in your possessions, your effects, your ability to travel, which is to say your freedom and liberty to exercise it as you will with this or without it?  Not just for today, mind you, but in a worst case scenario of malign government deciding to prosecute past crimes that they decree illegal now, because they no longer feel restrained by the US Constitution and are going to be quite able to create ex-post facto laws and then pull up records to see who has to be rounded up.  Data collection is only about today when it is restricted to case work that must start from scratch and the public record.  Yet, in silence, the government has decided that we are all future criminals, and that no one is secure from its scrutiny, ever.

Let us change venue for a moment and go to the Google Glasses and HUD developments of other groups that is starting up in the last six months to a year.  This is Gen Zero of these devices which will augment your reality by offering you a computer display on the inside of glasses to help you better understand the world.  No matter how stylish they become, they are an artifact of on-line use and technology and there are good real world uses to them.  Add in a cell phone connection on-demand and there you have the NSA and DoJ ready to collect your data queries along with your GPS position, and timestamp.  What you want, when you want it and where you want it are now all available metadata to them, and you have decided to write it off.  Isn't that grand?

What would you want out of such a system?

High Definition overlays?  Easily done by installing a camera either at the bridge section over the nose or, if you want 3D object recognition, one each at the base of the arms so you get stereo vision and 3D capability.

Virtual Real World Synthesis?  This is where the cameras on your device begin to automatically filter resolution for re-display either with semi-transparent lenses or meshing up the virtual and real world together for display on the inside of the glasses.

Active object and face recognition?  Boy won't this be handy to call up the publicly shared data on individuals and items, huh?  Never a bad date... and that stalker will be able to figure out if you are armed or not.  Good job, that!  Always easier to target the unarmed than the armed, you know.

Active tracking of finances in real time?  Handy at the store and probably a Version 1 or 2 item to let you find out the UPC code information and maybe look for competitive pricing before you go shopping.  Add in an on-line inventory system and you can even know if you should go to a store or not, based on what you want.  Mind you, they capture that query information and may only make that available to their 'special customers' who agree to give up their shopping habits at that store chain to them.  Which is then sold in bulk to marketers who accumulate all your 'special' purchase information together to more readily target you with ads, on the fly, and to help you 'decided' in favor of certain products and services.  Handy, huh?

Photo and Video Capture?  Full HD resolution photos and video capture, at least locally to start but for those who love streaming this stuff to your FB or other social media account, now your friends will always know where you are, what you are doing, with whom, where you go and how long you stayed there.  Heck, a bit of hacking and they can know how much you spent, too.   Even create a full 3D image of your body, clothed and unclothed!  Just like the TSA!

Cellphone is a given.  Add in a couple of small aural conducting speakers to vibrate your skull so you can hear stuff and maybe wrap the arms a bit around the ears to get microphones close to the mouth with some data augmentation to clear up your voice, and you now have full data capture of what you do.  The cellphone system may become a bit strapped, but there is plenty of spectrum left over from the demise of the old broadcast TV just sitting out there.  I'm sure all of that can be pressed into service in no time at all, legally or otherwise.

Expect all of that in the 5 to 15 year time horizon.

You couldn't live without your cellphone, right?

And as you don't give a flying whoop about government data capture for them, then you certainly won't mind government knowing all of that information I've just outlined, right?

If you want a National Sales Tax, just imagine how easy THAT would be to implement and NOT even require the seller to get it: they can charge you on your purchases DIRECTLY without any of that messy privacy stuff because you signed it away.  Why bother with a middle-man when you can just grab that information DIRECTLY FROM YOU CONSTANTLY.  By giving the government the power to tax individual purchases it is given a reason to collect that data.  And why do it on the bulk side when you can get far more in revue AFTER the mark-up has been put in place?

And finances are not even the start of it.

Messy divorce?  Those details will now never go away because of social media.  Have a lover on the side... and how short a time is it until that is found out?  Paternity test shows that the husband is not the father?  Spend too much?  Spend too much time with friends and neglect your children?  Pregnant?  Every argument that is captured by these devices will be put up for constant reminder to you of your past.  They will not go away.

This will be wonderful for exercise!  Your doctor and the IRS can see just how much of it you do, when you do it, how often and what you do.  Sex, too, of course since that is mere exercise, you know?  What is your favorite position?  How often?  How much?  And if you forgot and kept those glasses where they can see what you are doing, then, really, its your fault, right?

Your private life?  Gone.  And that is if, and only if, you do nothing today to not just celebrate Independence but to BE Independent.

I have a couple of cellphones in the Faraday Cage.  Pay a fee to make sure I can get some connection in the case of a disaster if there are any surviving cell phone towers or at least ones that are powered up and working.  They are a few years old.  I don't use them for non-emergency purposes and I live without them.

Beyond these blogs and a couple of places I sometimes leave commentary, I have no social media connection or contacts.  Period.  No FB, no Twitter, no LI, and that is fully and completely intentional. I keep a public e-mail account by a compromised company, the same one you are reading this from, BTW.  Always glad to use the enemy's tools against them. 

Yes conservatives should be utilizing social media.  I am no conservative.

If you saw the movie Minority Report, you have a sense of how this is going, outside of the putative storyline there are the surroundings of the characters that must be taken into account.  Advertising that is always addressing itself to you as you go through malls, along sidewalks, indeed everywhere there is a camera there is a means to follow and contact you.  Luckily you will be carrying the necessary tracking devices with you in your brand new HUD Mark X!

I cannot live and get the necessary tools for being Independent without making on-line purchases.  You can spin-up real quickly by doing so.  Getting tools, fasteners, raw materials, equipment and the rest of it is done much faster via those channels and doing without them slows up a process that I do not have years to do.  Minimal exposure is about the best I can accomplish.  This isn't the 1970's or 1980's or 1990's, but the 21st century.   This is no longer an era where privacy can be assumed but must be protected actively, by you, against all intrusions no matter how seemingly benign they disguise themselves as for you to agree to them.

And if life extension continues on at its current rate, this sort of thing will not leave you, forever.  No matter if you turn over a new leaf, the moment you do that is recorded.  Your first instance of failure is recorded.  Everything you do, say, purchase, talk to, and every movement you make will be recorded.  At that point you are no longer a citizen nor subject, but a lab rat who is no longer a person, no longer an individual, but just a collection of data to be devoured by companies and government.  Your pluses and minuses as a person all get recorded constantly because you agree to it and actively want it.  You will even pay for it.

Yes, yes indeed you will pay for it.

Forever.

I will do my best to live to the attitude of The Prisoner:

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.

My life is my own.

I am a free man.

Are you?

End Game Against Freedom

Note this is a cross-post.  I am looking to utilize some of this material for another post, but that is a look at what it takes to retain freedom (or gain it) when governments no longer respect freedom and liberty of the individual.  The post now follows.

What is the End Game of the global elites against freedom and liberty?  We can see its path by addicting populations to 'social' provisions such as 'retirement' and 'health care', which are different things than living a good life or providing good doctors and medicine.  This is the Redistributive State which seeks to undermine freedom by giving people material goods in return for those people relinquishing ever more control of their lives to the State.

This can be done by means of an Elite funding or promulgating a lower societal uprising so as to force society to be under enough pressure to call for a crackdown on those putting them at risk.  It is a mug's game, a violent game of 3 Card Monte in which those seeking to lead a normal life are The Mark.  When you agree to the 'good' that such government provided social programs can do at the cost of taking money from those who have rightfully earned it via their liberty, you agree to limit the liberty of all: of the rich to be rich, of the poor to realize that they are the source of their own problems, and of the middle class to purchase the passivity of the poor with the wealth of the rich and hoping for a few scraps for themselves.  When you wash, rinse and repeat this sort of thing you are in the  process of breaking the will of individuals to have a free society, to stand up for freedom and ridiculing them because they actually support the ability of people to get rich and of the poor to also have that same opportunity.  What is offered is the class system, at first, which turns into a self-fulfilling Caste System with those at the upper levels dictating to the rest of society how it shall act in its own terms.

The modern West is in one or more cycles of this, but it is interesting to look at one society where this has reached an end-game: there are no longer any illusions of providing social goods because they aren't necessary as the will of those to have a civil society have been broken.  In China there is so much autocratic control and police suppression that it is hard to get information out, but in another place there is just enough of a shame culture left and the attempts to have a veneer of civilization remaining that we can get a look at what this looks like.

I've reported on the Red Mafia before a number of times, and this time I'm coming at it not from the 'find all low level sources to piece together a framework' end, but at the other end of what happens when a very few who actually want to do their jobs in government AS jobs in government actually give the high level framework in stark detail.  I found this through Amazon Pime's service in  film documentary by Andrei Nekrasov who recounted the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in Poisoned by Polonium.  I had looked at part of the aftermath of this assassination of Litvinenko, but the lead-up to it and the high levels of corruption and societal abuse it points at is telling.  It is a film I urge everyone to see since, if you want to see where a quasi-western State ends when its elites assume autocratic control, there is no better overview of just how this can come to be.

The events the film reviews are centered on the post-Soviet collapse in the 1990's where the productive capacity of the old Soviet industries came under the sway of two general classes of individuals: old Soviet elites and organized crime.  In some cases there is no differentiating between the two because they have a connecting link in the secret service, the FSB which used to be the KGB, and actually dates back to the Czar's Cheka.  At one point they are actually referred to in their modern FSB incarnation under that term: their name changes but their methodology of violence in service to State remains. 

From Litvinenko we hear about this directly:

In our country, the special services are, in fact, a secret political organization that uses sharp methods, secret methods, not against spies and terrorists, but solely to keep a ruling class in power.  In 1999, for example, to seize power, the FSB used secret methods that are only allowed against terrorists and spies.  If the army were to seize power, they'd roll in with tanks and guns and fly in with jets maybe.  But everyone would notice. The FSB, on the other hand, has secret methods, and nobody noticed anything until chekists made up the government and seized every organ of power.  If the KGB was the armed unit of the Communist Party, then the FSB is the armed unit of – of a caste of corrupt Russian officials.

Normally a 'Police State' is something created by a dictator or tyrant as a means to control the population by deploying the police as parts of the government with the sole aim to keep the people controlled by police power.  In the case of Russia this has been flipped around where it is the Secret Police that now put forward their own minions into politics to give a veneer of choice but, in actuality, by their brutal and repressive methods that they keep secret but are whispered about, there is no choice at all.  Really if something is undertaken to sway the public via terrorist means promulgated by the Secret Police who, exactly, is going to investigate them?  Anyone seeking to do so can be intimidated via the system that is in place of informers, records, laws promulgated to help keep the police in power, and then enforced by a corrupt legal system upon those who try to bring the actual truth forward.

With tin-pot tyrants if you have a revolution to get rid of the tyrant, can you be sure that it wasn't the secret police that actually instigated the revolt to put themselves into power?  And when a society shucks off its old totalitarian State apparatus, what happens if it actually keeps the secret police around?  Unfortunately this last question is answered in Russia.

One of the men a special unit of the FSB was to frame a man or take him out of ciruclation , and that manwas Lt. Colonel Trepashkin who was starting to piece together just what was going on inside Russia.  He recounts his story:

My first conflict in the '90s was with today's FSB director Patrushev.  I rounded up a gang that laundered money, murdered people, consisted of war lords.  At some point, I had finally managed to get them, but then the problems really started.  There was that classic chain of protection that gangsters always have whether in the FSB, the military intelligence, or in the police.  I was told to drop the case.  I said "Why, these are criminals, we have to indict them.  I won't drop it!"

The agent inside the FSB who was told to frame him so that Trepashkin would be stopped and was recorded on tape in case anything happened to any of the men from the special group in the FSB:

Trepashkin knew something, and they were afraid he'd reveal it in court.  That was my first assignment in the new department that I found really suspicious.  We ended up avoiding it and never completed it.  At the concluding session of 1997 – [..] My boss Kamyshnikov came to me and said, "You must kill Berezovsky."

There is one relevant question that can be asked of Russian society, however, before going on to how the FSB got into power: were the Russian people ready for freedom from an autocratic, indeed, authoritarian State?  For that there is an answer from Boris Berezovsky:

Berezovsky -  So we can put forward – So a certain hypothesis can be put forward.  The better the opportunities a political system offers its members, the citizens, the more efficient the system is.  But the citizens must accept, voluntarily, certain limitations on free will.  A transition from a totalitarian system to a liberal one can only take place when enough of its citizens learn to accept certain inner limitations of free will.

Nekrasov – Perhaps the transition from external limitations to inner ones.

B – Exactly!

N -  Inefficient systems force external limitations.

[..]

B – What a price humans have to pay for knowledge.  How hard it is to rise above the common wisdom.

N- Is it even more difficult for Russians, would you say?

B -  I know what you mean.  The Russian mentality is that of slaves. That's why the system of forced limitations is so welcome. So why then am I advocating liberalism in Russia?  Am I contradicting myself, advocating freedom for the Russians, going against the nation's character?  So, is Russia ready, which means her people ready to take up the responsibility of freedom? I think they are ready.  Because once the tyrannical dictate was lifted, millions of entrepreneurs appeared, a myriad of independent politicians and journalists appeared.  Russia turned out fully prepared for this crucial, historical step.  We only needed to move forward and consolidate that freedom.  And so my main conflict with the authorities today  is about individual independence.  All those stupidities – media controls, "vertical power" – have one result.  Destruction of freedom in the minds of Russia's citizens.

One can see where Boris Berezovsky is a very dangerous man to the FSB and those that they support.  The betrayal of freedom in Russia post – USSR started at those places that were the worst off condition-wise.  This exploitation would not only put the criminal oligarchs in power, but they would do so with the help of the FSB and the new Duma which had barely gotten time to get itself together.   The film recounts a cover-up of this period in which Vladimir Putin was involved with a company he had going in Germany which was in contact with the Colombian Cartels and served as a money laundering outfit.  Putin was, at that point, head of the FSB while sitting on the board of that company.  This is recounted by Jürgen Roth, a German writer who has been tracking the Red Mafia's work:

Jurgen Roth - When the premesis of the SPAG here in the Frankfurt area were searched around lunchtime – Well, the offices were searched all day.  But around lunchtime, the Chancellor's office was informed.  That same day, the Russian Interior Ministry was tipped off about the search, which is strange.  Even before the search took place, the public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt tried to suppress the case.  What was on their mind was that Putin was central to this whole affair.  The prosecutor investigating the case didn't get any help. 

It all started with a report about money laundering in Liechtenstein.  In this report the BND, the federal intelligence service, there was a note about the SPAG company laundering money for Russian criminal organization called Tambovskaya.  And so the Public Prosecutor Kirkpatrick opened an investigation.  Soon after that, it was confirmed that money laundering was taking place, that the Tambovskaya connection existed and that Putin might be involved. 

When the company was founded, Putin was on the board of directors for half a year in 1993.  After that he was on the advisory board until 2000.  During that time he was in St. Petersburg and also already director of the FSB.  So he was on the advisory board of SPAG while he was the director of the FSB. 

Now I am familiar with the workings of the FSB.  If someone somewhere so much as farted, he got a written report about it.  And it's hardly plausible that Putin was not informed about all this, about what was going on with SPAG's money and that the people behind it were criminals, classic mafiosi.  He was under investigation for accepting large sums of drug money,  which is undisputed.

N- That was ascertained?

R – It was ascertained by the courts in Liechtenstein.  You can also track his longtime intelligence connections to Germany, to Dresden. I've got a list of all the intelligence officers from the GDR era, and Putin is on it.  Even back then, he kept close connections with the entire intelligence community involved in dirty business.

N – The East German?

R – The GDR intelligence service.  Stasi.

N- Corruption and things?

R – Not only corruption.  Corruption – That's a matter of course.  No one even discusses that anymore.  It's more to do with spying and destruction.  How do I destroy a political opponent?

This is not the first instance that Putin was involved with underhanded dealing for personal gain via criminal means.  This starts with a lead that Litvinenko gives:

Shortly after I gave the interview on Radio Liberty, publications appeared that accused me of slandering our president.  Not to mention that Putin was caught stealing metal assignments and funds in the early '90s in St. Petersburg.

To properly understand what Putin was doing in Leningrad it is important to hark back to what else was going on in the Non-Ferrous Metals outfits at the time, and here I wall draw on my prior piece A taste of Oil For Food and its chefs, which goes over the process of 'tolling'.  With the Russian economy crippled by State facilities being unable to make any payroll at all, the workers were down to barter of goods their facilities produced in exchange for other goods from other workers in other facilities.  This was causing problems as stuff like food wasn't made locally and had to be brought into many regions and without a cash  based system to work with, there was no way to barter ovens, say, for eggs, cheese and milk.  Those who stepped in to put money into these facilities were generally of two major classes: rich elites of the former Soviet State, and organized crime.  Some facilities did try entrepreneurial capitalism, yes, but for large metal works, aluminum plants, steel foundries, titanium smelters... heavy industry in other words... you needed cash.  Lots of cash.  And these 'investors' wanted a 'sweet deal' from the new government and they insisted on 'tolling'.

This form of 'tolling' is unlike having to pay a certain charge on a toll-based road, however, as that is a government tax on use of that road by those who travel on it.  Here it is something else entirely: the agreement by the government not to put a tariff on goods that the producers get in exchange for their output.  What this put in place was a system whereby the workers actually got paid a pittance, almost all of what was produced went outside the country, what came back after sales had no tariff on them and were then sold at above market prices locally.  If you run this sort of system then those running the business get to keep their overseas money, put a small amount in goods to come back, garner a huge windfall of increased prices for those goods versus what a competitive market would garner and then pocket those profits, as well.  Because State power is used to enforce who gets market share and is able to exclude exterior competition and their better managed systems, what you get is a near monopoly on certain regions and markets by what is effectively monopolies run by organized crime.  Isn't it great when you get to write the bills to be passed like this?

From this the section of the film in which Leningrad (St. Petersburg) comes into clear focus because the situation was one in which Putin was part of a transactional scheme to exchange raw materials for food, or metals for food in 1991-92.  Any FSB agent who understands this sort of region and its criminal element is set to make out like a bandit which is, exactly, what Putin did and was written up and dismissed from the program by local officials about the external affairs office and has since been made to disappear as a document and is very difficult to find copies of it anywhere, even on the Internet.  The value of the amount embezzled was $11.5 million which meant that the citizens of St. Petersburg would go hungry and food would be rationed there for the first time since WWII.  That amount is a low-end figure as it doesn't go into specific foodstuff costs which were left out from the contracts.  From the report:

There are reasons to suggest that partners did not intend to import foodstuffs to St. Petersburg.

[..]

The recommendations to refer the case to the city prosecutor's office and to remove Mr. Putin from his position.

In 2000 another investigation clarified that because of what happened St. Petersburg did not receive foodstuffs in excess of $92 million, but the total cost left unjustified to the committee amounts to $850 million.  All from an organization that was being run by Mr. Putin.

And how did Vladimir Putin get into power?

If you are the head of a secret police organization using illegal means to enforce power, to work with organized crime, and to partake of such crimes as well, and you have the power and means to undercut the judiciary and subvert military officers, then you are left with very little to resist you.  With that said there is one pretext for a State assuming additional powers and that is war.  In this case the war in Chechnya and, most critically, the second phase of it that started with the bombing of a bridge and then an apartment complex in Moscow.

Those bombings had one strange artifact to them: in the case of the bridge bombing there was an FSB agent found dead at the site of it and in the apartment complex bombing an FSB agent was indicted for having supplied the necessary explosives.  Or should it be said that these were Special Agents, for they were.  The denial of the FSB is, ostensibly, 'we couldn't have done it'.  Even though agents of the FSB are implicated.  Indeed this brings into question why a tank column was stopped outside of Grozny for days and then bombed just before the other attacks.  Tank columns do not stop by roadsides for days at a time as that is wasteful in men and resources who can be better used for doing other things, like not needing field maintenance.  If you are trying to put together a meme of advancing terrorist attacks, would there be a better way to do it than just as it was done?  Because terrorists, you see, don't work on 'front lines' and don't need to 'advance' via announcing themselves with periodic attacks along a given axis of movement: they are not military units.

To get more State power over media, over the economy, over people, is there any means better than a war?

If the secret police of a State using illegal means put forward a program to require the current regime to delegitimize itself, would there be any better way than to start what is, essentially, a civil war and then assert 'special powers' in 'rooting out terrorists' by that self-same secret police?  And then, in the midst of awful, bloody fighting, wouldn't it be nice to have political backing, even if from extreme nationalists, for such activity?  Because that also came with the Chechen war and is one of the most startling visual artifacts of the documentary: skinheads chanting for Putin while waving a flag with a black hammer and sickle in a white circle on a red field.  The swastika replaced by the hammer and sickle.  And chants for killing them all, the Chechens and, although none had any involvement in this, the Jews.

With the election of Vladimir Putin also came the election of a high number of FSB agents and officials also 'winning' elections so that every organ of the State was soon in control of the government.  Some may remember the terrorist attack on the theater in Russia where patrons were held captive by 'terrorist' gunmen.  One of those was an FSB agent who was put into a high position by Putin some months after the 'terrorist attack'.

If China points to international socialism becoming a formulation of national socialism, which is to say fascism, then when genocidal war is mixed into that, as is the case in Russia, you get a form of fascism known as Nazism. Of course it will be denied up and down the line, yet the supporters of State power continue to show up with proper symbology be it that twisty, interlocking geometric design of the New Dawn party in Greece, or the swastika replaced hammer and sickle flag in Russia.  This, most virulent form of socialism at the nationalist scale, is a horror for mankind... although not a lesser horror than international socialist kind as both look to kill to get to and remain in power.  Often with tens of millions dead in that quest.

The true horror is the attitude taken by prosecutors and governments outside of Russia when companies started by FSB agents or organized crime in Russia, and it is hard to say which is worse at this point, are then suspected of criminal acts.  Money laundering, drug running, and, of course, murder using exotic means like a highly rare, short lived, radioactive metal like Polonium.  Litvinenko thought he was safe in Great Britain, but safety is only an illusion unless the State will actually do its job to keep you safe from exterior attack... not turn a blind eye towards it or refuse to ask hard questions or even seek to shut down inquests.  Yet, in the West, we see that in Great Britain and Germany, and if that sort of thing is going in those States, one with the longest history of people seeking democratic freedom and the other the one place that should have learned its lessons about the horrors of NOT investigating such things, then what does that say about the rest of Europe and the West as a whole?

In the US we have a man like Eric Holder who, it must be remembered, was involved in some very sorry episodes in the Clinton Administration, proving to be duplicitous in the Elian Gonzales affair, who also put forward a pardon for Marc Rich.  The same Marc Rich who would show up in post-Soviet Russia to bring 'tolling' as a concept with him to teach to the oligarchs.  It is certain Vladimir Putin knew of Marc Rich – as the head of the FSB that would not escape his notice.  And as Marc Rich had investments in operations going across Russia, east to west, it is very likely that Vladimir Putin had more than a nodding acquaintance of Marc Rich's tactics and techniques.  Did Putin actually know Marc Rich, a man then on the lam from the FBI for questioning with an international search warrant out for him prior to his pardon?  Especially as Putin used the methodologies that Rich brought with him to absolute perfection, can that be just chalked up to being a real good study of those techniques?  You don't use them by accident, that's for sure, but with criminal intent as the two commissions investigating the starving of St. Petersburg pointed out.  And as the courts in Liechtenstein also pointed to in the case of SPAG.  Makes you wonder where SPAG got its money, doesn't it? 

Back to Eric Holder, for a moment, how does such a man pushing for a known organized crime participant to get a pardon, which he must have known in his position at the FBI, get a 'pass' by any political establishment?  How does a duplicitous public official with policing powers entrusted to him violate that trust and, yet, get promoted?  How does criminal operations of running guns to Mexican Cartels, and to other non-State operators overseas, against the treaties we have signed with these Nations, actually get a yawn from the media?

What does the End Game Against Freedom look like?

Vladimir Putin had many contacts in the intelligence and police community overseas.

Here's a thought.

President Eric Holder.

But only after some suitable 'national emergency' has taken place in which 'extraordinary powers' need to be used to 'stop' advancing 'attacks' by organizations that don't do advancing 'attacks'.  That is the equivalent in the US.

The End Game Against Freedom is a Police State.

Run by the Secret Police, not a dictator creating one but a dictator put in power by one.

Who watches the Watchmen?

Brought to you by A Citizen of the Republic

The deals, fiscal cliff and Weimar

When the Weimar Republic went into a tailspin it was due to outstanding debt (war debt from WWI) that it couldn't repay coupled with a hoarding binge set off by the need to actually feed returning soldiers.  Hoarding of food started the German Mark going on an inflationary spiral as the amount of food dwindled the price of the remaining food skyrocketed.  As costs rose the German government tried to cover that by printing more money, thereby devaluing their currency which then caused foreign debt holders to doubt the value of their debt assets as they were getting paid in money worth less and less because it was not pegged to the gold standard.  When that happened hyper-inflation set in to the point where you had to spend a paycheck when you got it just to get anything of value from your work.

Money is an exchange value of work put in to perceived value for final goods, after all, so when any government starts to print money they are saying: your work is worth less to you because we can't manage the value of the currency.  Because there is an inherent work valuation in finished products delivered to market, when more money is printed the goods are worth more, as well, which is inflation: it is more money trying to chase a set intrinsic value of work investment in goods production and when the currency is devalued then more of it is needed to get that intrinsic value.

When the foreign creditors came knocking the German economy imploded with hyper-inflation as the government tried printing more money to the point where you needed carts and wheelbarrows to get money to a store on the hour you were paid... yes you were paid by the hour at that point and the government had set up rationing of how much you were allowed to get, but that was meaningless when you couldn't buy anything.  Finally the German Mark was worthless and everything ground to a halt in Germany: the banks shut down, the industries imploded and stopped manufacturing, and the agricultural sector only got by if they could barter actual food for work.  Thus you had barter.

Welcome to the land of the US 'fiscal cliff' brought on to you by the debt given to you by the US federal government which went off the gold standard under Richard Nixon!

The US debt by our government is $16 trillion and growing at a phenomenal rate.  The annual deficit, per year, of the federal government is heading north of $1.5 trillion/year.  The Federal Reserve (that set of private banks the US government allows to handle our debt servicing for a fee, lucky them! and the printers of cash) are now inflating the US dollar under the guise of 'Quantative Easing' I, I II and a limitless III, with worthless cash now sitting in reserve to cover the US federal government's spending because, surprise!, no one overseas wants to buy it.  The largest holder of the US federal debt is the Federal Reserve.

What is the 'fiscal cliff'?  The inability of the US federal government to get spending under control and wanting to turn the US economy into the Weimar Republic by being unable to stop the red spread of ink to cover the stuff that can't be covered by taxes.  This was approached just after the prior election cycle and a deal was made to keep the economy going: raise the debt ceiling for more deficit spending in exchange for keeping tax rates where they were under what became the Bush/Obama tax cuts.  Now the debt ceiling is approaching, the deal is about to end and the tax rates are about to skyrocket taking another chunk out of the US economy to go into the federal bottomless pit.  Capital gains taxes will rise from 15% to 20%.  The Alternative Minimum Tax, set up to hit 'the rich' way back when, is not indexed to inflation and will go up to take in about 30 million citizens who are far and away just in the upper middle class to rich category.  Because everyone, to some extent, has money in the equity markets and capital gains are utilized to garner money from the growth of companies, all Americans will suffer.  Once the taxes are in place there will be less incentive to gain money from capital growth and less reason to increase wages and earnings due to the cost of running companies rising due to the Quantative Easing.

The rich get this hit, the poor get this hit, everyone gets this hit.  Income tax goes up in each bracket so the lowest bracket goes up from 10% to 15%, the middle class goes from 33% to 36%,  and the highest bracket  goes up from 35% to about 40%.  Some other cuts expiring are the child tax credit, some higher education expenses tax credits and FICA goes up 2% on every wage earner.  Added tax for Medicare goes up by 3.8% as well as the brandy-new Obamacare. The Estate Tax goes up.  You see?  Fairness!  Everyone suffers.

Net amount gained?  $440 billion

Because of the deal there are also some spending cuts, mostly to the military, which are a figurative 'drop in the bucket'.  The entire US military could drop out of the budget and you would still have over $1 trillion in deficit spending without 'the deal'.  The 99 weeks of unemployment goes back to 26 weeks... and good luck in finding a job, eh?

So while the US economy locks up, there is that other thing coming around again: the debt ceiling.

For the $2 trillion plus $440 billion and change the US government gets in tax revenue, it spends $3.5 trillion per year.   And if you did make the military magically go away as the Left keeps on wanting it to do, you would only have... $3 trillion in spending.  Needless to say there needs to be some military to protect the Nation and we can start shutting down bases wholesale overseas to trim just a bit more out of structural costs.  In other words due to the amount the Obama Administration has asked for in structurally increased spending, the expiring tax cuts would only lower deficit spending from $1.5 trillion to $1.1 trillion per year.

Now what are the major line items that the federal government will have to rack up?  First is servicing that $16 trillion debt:

Debt Service: $250 billion

After that the military.  Now lets take a 20% across the board hit plus a bit more and give every Leftists a wet dream just to paint the rosiest of rosy pictures for them and they can't say I didn't give them what they asked for:

DoD: $400 billion

Say that leaves $1.75 trillion per year!  Say did you know that Social Security (FICA tax) and the Medicare tax don't cover the cost of those programs?  They are both running in the red with SSA cashing out 'special bonds' which will increase the cost of our Debt Service line... but lets say that it doesn't just to keep things simple.  Now you would think that ANY GOVERNMENT should be able to do basic functions on that remaining haul, right?

First up paying up on SSA:

SSA: $880 billion

Ok, you are down to having a total of $870 billion of revenue to spend!  Geeze, can't we get by on that?  Next up are the M&M's, Medicare and Medicaid (sans Obamacare), which aren't bad but aren't all that hot, either:

M&Ms: $800 billion, approx. no one can give exacting figures due to Obamacare cuts and changes

For $70 billion you can now fund the rest of the federal budget.

Now to be fair, Obamacare rightly belongs with the M&Ms, making them the MMO, so lets add in that to get the actual cost change to the system:

MMO: $920 billion (again inexact as NO ONE has an idea of the TRUE COST of Obamacare)

Your $70 billion to spend now goes into a $50 billion deficit, red ink in other words.

The rest of the federal government has not been funded at this point.  Here are some relatively mandatory agencies based on what their functions are (although do regard them with a huge grain of salt as they are summaries and, unfortunately, the actual functions tend to be small parts of a bureaucratic morass):

Homeland Security:  $40 billion

VA:  $61 billion

State Dept: $48 billion

INTEL Community: $0.5 billion

HHS: $78 billion (the overhead cost in personnel and such  to run MMO)

Interior:  $11 billion (but they want to close the parks!!!)

Treasury: $4.7 billion (remember the Federal Reserve is a quasi-governmentally chartered organization, NOT the Treasury)

SSA: $9 billion (the overhead cost of personnel and such to run SSA)

Cost to run these parts that are Constitutionally required (in whole or in part) or to keep discretionary wealth transfer payments going is thus

Cats & Dogs: $255 billion

To fund the C&Ds with Obamacare gets a $305 billion deficit, and without it a $185 billion deficit.

Everything else (EPA, Education, Justice, Labor, HUD, Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Transportation, Corps. of Engineers, NSF, SBA, all of this stuff) gets zeroed out and eliminated from the US federal government.  The big goose-egg for funding, but the property can be sold off to get a bit of revenue, which doesn't matter a lot, but gets you something.  Also the regulatory behemoth gets it right in the heart and topples over dead as a doornail.

If the agreement made post-2010 is actually kept for taxes and then the debt limit is NOT RAISED, then what to fund in the federal government becomes a very interesting proposition.  Take all the truly mandatory (as in specified in the US Constitution) stuff and you get, in spending:

Debt Service: $250 billion

DoD: $400 billion (unrealistic, but fun to tweak the Left with on their wet dreams)

Cats & Dogs: $255 billion

Absolutely mandatory, by the US Constitution required spending: $0.905 trillion

That isn't bad.

Cost of voluntary spending:

SSA: $880 billion

MMO: $920 billion (again inexact as NO ONE has an idea of the TRUE COST of Obamacare)

Total spending on Entitlements: $1.8 trillion

Total spending: $2.705 trillion (but probably more as these things go)

Total revenue from all sources: $2.44 trillion

Total deficit in 2013:  $300 billion (approx.)

And no other parts of the US federal government left outside the mandatory Cats & Dogs.

This is the sort of math that gets done if you don't raise the debt ceiling: you make hard choices of what to cut, and something else outside of DoD (which I gave the Leftists a wet dream on) and more taxes is the issue as that voluntary or discretionary portion of the budget is set to be the long-term budget buster as no one forecasts those outlays to go DOWN as a structural portion of the budget, but only UP and sharply upwards.  Remember that before Obamacare was factored in you had a $70 billion surplus before you got to other mandatory spending and that other mandatory spending would have given you a deficit of $800 billion without Obamacare.  There is no way to run any of the math on Obamacare and have it come out cost neutral or actually cut the cost of the government because it RAISES the cost of government.  That one CBO report was so rigged, so based on non-adjusted numbers and static (meaning it didn't take into considerations responses to the law) that it was a lie, pure and outright.  It just doesn't work that way.

So if you cap off spending you then have areas you must cut.  You can save a bit trimming at mandatory spending, but that is not the problem in this budget: 'entitlements' are.

Let's say that everything was capped and, say, Obamacare not funded, a bit of trimming at State, HHS (unfunded Obamacare), unnecessary functions at DHS (like the TSA) and Interior (like handing back land to the States to get rid of overhead functions) and you get a deficit neutral budget.  What happens, firstly, is the regulatory overburden from the rest of the government, plus the subsidies to do inefficient things (like corn based ethanol and 'green' energy) go away.  So does DoJ, which includes the FBI, BATFE, and a number of other functions all blow into dust and Eric Holder is out of a job.  Labor goes away as an agency, and so does OSHA and all the federal overhead with it.  The EPA becomes dry gulch of unsustainable regulations no one will enforce at the federal level.  After that the Cost of Living Adjustments for SSA and M&Ms might be frozen for a few years and harsh means testing put in place to get the upper middle class off of the M&Ms.

Basically it is saying to the States: you are on your own.

It also gives a major signal to the credit markets: the US is now serious about paying off its debt and can be considered a secure place to invest as we are no longer in the red at the federal level.

The Federal Reserve to liquidate its worthless cash then starts to jack up interest rates to, say, 25-30% for 4-6 years which has a two-fold effect of making loans for a number of banks nearly impossible to make, but also draws in external capital and cash to start funding companies in the US that are now unshackled from the federal regulatory monster (although the tax problem is a major one, still, that regulatory overburden will allow companies to free up their own capital to invest).  Unemployment goes up for 2-5 years as the job market expands and new entrants try to find positions in it and labor participation rates increase, and this is a GOOD THING, unlike now where labor participation rate is dropping which is a BAD THING.

The worst of all scenarios is just agreeing on anything like the path we are on.

A half-way decent agreement would be one to scrap Obamacare and all the stuff Obama has put in, for an exchange of another debt ceiling limit raise which will also be the LAST time and that will be made clear to everyone.  This gets a couple of years to restructure entitlements, roll back government slowly, and get the Federal Reserve to stop filling up the swimming pool sized punch bowl for us to drown in and pull out the plug on the monetary Debt Star.

The best of all scenarios is for the House to hold out that Obama asked for the cliff in exchange for a one-time ceiling hike, and now that he has gotten all the taxes he wanted, he should be smart enough to figure out how to fund the government with $2.44 trillion.  He asked for it, so give it to him.  If this is what all these bozos got elected on (and that is what the Left is saying for taxes) then the agreement MUST be good.  Hard medicine to go cold turkey on spending, yes.  But it is, after all, what was agreed-upon: the deficit addict goes cold turkey after one last hit on taxes and then balances the budget in one year.  The Left wanted, with a vengeance, the 'Clinton Era Tax Rates' so GIVE IT TO THEM and demand a return to CLINTON ERA SPENDING RATES and the CLINTON SIZE OF GOVERNMENT to boot.  They loved the Clinton era so much, then tell them to bring it ALL BACK on both taxes and spending.   You can formulate your own approach, but the basics are to get spending in line, kill regulations, put the States on their own and let them all know: no bailouts for you.

These idiots Upon The Hill I expect to be the worst of all possible people.

Idiots.

Fools.

Debt Junkies.

And they HATE that your WORK is worth something to YOU and want to PUNISH you for being PRODUCTIVE.  They want to CONTROL YOUR LIFE from cradle to grave, take all you own and then have you THANK THEM for being so nice to you.

When you hear the words 'Grand Bargain' and it doesn't include any rollback, then you will have your answer if we are going Weimar or not.

No rollback: Weimar.

Rollback and government accountable to citizens: America.

I'm preparing for Weimar.

I am hoping for America, but hope is not a strategy, preparation is and sends a message all its own that is unmistakable.

Progressivism's New Man

Progressivism has been about the expansion of government authority and power into realms that it has been barred from in the United States both via Constitution and via custom.  This type of law goes back deep into the English law system as seen under Bracton (as I explored in this post), in that there were few written laws in England and many local laws of custom as explained thusly from Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England:

[010] Though in almost all lands use is made of the leges and the jus scriptum, England
[011] alone uses unwritten law and custom. There law derives from nothing written [but]
[012] from what usage has approved.4 Nevertheless, 5it will not be absurd to call English
[013] laws leges, though they are unwritten, since whatever has been rightly decided and
[014] approved with the counsel and consent of the magnates and the general agreement
[015] of the res publica,6 the authority of the king or prince having first been added
[016] thereto,7 has the force of law.8 9England has as well many local customs, varying
[017] from place to place, for the English have many things by custom which they do
[018] not have by law, as in the various counties, cities, boroughs and vills, where it will
[019] always be necessary to learn what the custom of the place is and how those who
[020] allege it use it.

In the 13th century England had local laws (leges which were unwritten) as well as a modicum of National laws from the Monarchy and Ecclesiastical law from the Church.  Thus, as a whole, those who sat as judges in England had to be able to differentiate between what issues were to be decided and which venue they belonged in and how to then interpret the law so as to come to a consistent and just ruling.  What Bracton called for was the institution of written legal rulings so as to build a body of work that would allow for future judges to see how past decisions were made and attempt to create some regularity in the judicial system so that there would be a regularity in social understanding of the law and its three domains.  This is the concept that would prove to be a foundational one in the English Common Law and the US law systems (Civil, Military and the Civil/Admiralty) for criminal and non-criminal cases that would also add layers of State and Local law to federal law.

The United States has as part of its make-up not just a multi-tier code system in the federal realm, but a multi-layered multi-tiered system when the States and localities are added into the mix.  Indeed one can break local law while not breaking State nor federal law, which means that accountability to the legal code must be understood at all levels of legality.  This also forms a multi-layered and multi-tiered judiciary with recourse to higher levels of authority up to the level of the State and to the federal at the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).  The federalist doctrine embedded in the US Constitution is to put as much power (and thus law making) into the hands of the States and the people by restricting the scope and breadth of the federal system.  The rationale for this is that the finer grained the power structure at its basis, the less that coarser grained systems need to interfere and that problems are best solved at the personal and local level, not at the federal and Nation State level.

What the Progressive Era sought to do was to start shifting this power pyramid so as to put the National level into more control over individuals and States via multiple means.  One of the major ones is direct taxation on income, something that was expressly forbidden by the Constitution as it can be used as a punitive system against those who are merely out of political favor.  Another method is to expand the scope and power of the federal government to intervene on things like international drug trafficking via items like the Shanghai Treaty and through the use of internal tax stamps where stamps would never be issued and, thusly, no one could actually obtain the goods without the stamp nor safely acquire a stamp for such goods in the first place.  From these modest beginnings of corruption the US tax code has grown over the decades to become a behemoth of rules that were put in place due to political favoritism and punishment for the disfavored.  Likewise regulations to safeguard food and medicines (arguably a part of assured inter-State trade so that citizens could know what was in the products they were getting from other States) were layered over with laws against medications of various sorts to usurp local jurisdictions for such goods.  Instead of merely assuring such goods had a measurable purity and that they would have National safeguard in transport through districts that banned the sale of them, the inverted idea was to 'regularize' the patchworks into a whole: regulation had changed its meaning from assuring movement of goods through hostile jurisdictions to prohibiting their sale Nationally.  'Regulation' had gained a new meaning in federal trade realms that was far different than the old 'regularizing' and harmonizing of codes between States and became one of imposing laws on trade between States at the federal level.

This inverted pyramid of power, that is one where law flows from the top-down, is not new nor Progressive in nature as it has been the lot of mankind to have such inverted power structures for thousands of years.  Indeed the first records of governments in all societies, no matter what their geographic location or ethnicity, is that of this form of top-down government.  They have typical names to them of: dictatorship, monarchy, oligarchy, and empire.  These Nations are ruled by a State apparatus that concentrates power in the few and distant, not recognizing that transactions and administration is all local and distributed.  To early civilizations there is a form of order that comes from these centralized authoritarian States in that they put down a regularized form of law.  The negatives are that such law systems often tread on local custom, they are not amenable to localized input from those not affiliated with the regime, they are brittle to change and they are tyrannical because of these artifacts.  Wherever you hear the new or Progressive meaning of 'regulation' you are hearing the old word of tyranny.

Modern 'regulatory' States governing Nations have been tried in various guises called Communist and Fascist, along with variants of the Anarcho-Syndicalist and National Socialist types, and all are socialistic in their scope.  The generalized vision is that society is reformulated to be governed by a centralized body composed of Party Elites that then tell what everyone else should do.  These systems can have differences, say in the 'worker's councils' of the Anarcho-Syndicalist variety, but they all culminate in a central organized body running the government and the economy, and thus society, by a given doctrine.  It is, in short, a deeply religious form of government as it tolerates no other doctrinal views nor variation of anything which makes it totalitarian in scope.  Progressivism comes from this formulaic background in America (and partakes in great part in founding Anarcho-Syndicalism in Spain and Italy) and asserts that Marx's revolutionary goal will be achieved by evolutionary means.  These means include the slow erosion of capitalist economies, culture, and States through the methodology of applying socialized doctrine to regulate segments of the economy and increase control of the Nation State government over society in that doing.  It is fascinating to see that socialism and Socialists see capitalism and Capitalists as corrupt, but the only way they can get a corrupt system is by corrupting it themselves as Socialists in the name of socialism.  Which does beg the question: if capitalism is so corrupted, then why do you need to corrupt it further via socialist methods?  Those from the First International would actually criticize these Socialists on these grounds and that anything done to 'soften' or 'humanize' capitalism would draw out the agony of the capitalist States and that the greatest good that Socialists can do is to reinforce capitalism, push it to its few good ends (which even Marx enumerated) so as to get to the great socialist change faster.  An evolutionary approach was seen as making things worse for a longer period of time and could wind up with an even worse system which was State Capitalism which removed the minimal benefits of private capitalism and put in place a tyrannical system of State control that had no socialist goals.

Be that as it may, the Progressive system of socializing segments of the economy which directly impacted individuals (banking via the Federal Reserve, retirement via Social Security, medicine via Medicare and Medicaid, residential housing via Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae with the last to destroy the local lending market) was started in the 1910's and carried out all the way to President Bush (43) and Medicare Part D and President Obama's multi-pronged attack on the medical system via private insurers, student loans and shifting regulatory regimes from merely restrictional to those seeking to destroy large sections of the energy sector of the economy via 'green' energy and jobs.  The tax code was already blossoming, but further regulation of industry was needed via acts on labor, occupational safety and health, the 'environment' and taxation on specific goods and services (usually by rubrics of pre-existing regulatory regimes).

Many have stated that the end result is that at any given moment you are violating a host of regulations, laws and other rules at multiple levels of government who see fit to try and manage you via such laws.  As these law formulations are dense, complex and not well stated to the point of being incomprehensible to the common man, the lawyer has been elevated to a position of high status to just try and figure this stuff out.  Ditto the tax preparer.  This is a state of being that has a sociological description to it:

Environmental questions on how crime is enacted are perhaps regularly asked in criminology, but elaborated theories that explain behavioral variations are rare. Sometimes, routine activities theory (Cohen and Felson 1979) is used to answer such questions. According to this theory, crime arises from patterns of ordinary legal activities. When these patterns lead to motivated perpetrators and unprotected targets being present in the same place at the same time, the necessary and sufficient conditions for criminality are fulfilled, and crimes will occur. By this theory, crime is thus a question of “systematic coincidence.” An objection to this approach is that it does not take the goal-oriented behavior of many perpetrators sufficiently into account. For many of them, committing crimes is an everyday routine. Moreover, many criminals do not merely encounter unprotected targets by accident but consciously go in search of them, as is shown by the findings of many ethnographic studies (e.g., Wright and Decker 1997, 1994). Rational choice theory (Cornish and Clarke 1986) is also frequently used to answer environmental questions on crime. This theory is not concerned with criminal motivation either, but in this case because it assumes that every person is in principle prepared to commit crime. Rational choice theory regards every form of behavior as a goal-oriented choice directed toward accomplishing objectives. The point of departure is that, after weighing the advantages and disadvantages of various alternatives, a choice is made which is optimal given the aim (benefit maximization). Rational choice theory itself is abstract and requires supplementary empirical content through specification of the relevant aims and choice situations. To be able to apply rational choice theory to questions of how crime is enacted, a supplemental theory is therefore often necessary with respect to the choice situations with which individuals are confronted as they make decisions about when, where, how and against what target an offense will be committed.

When regulations so overwhelm good sense and regular trade, when they intrude upon the smallest of activities in daily life, then the natural instinct is to seek the unprotected means around such regulations and to consciously seek them out.  Progressivism, and all totalitarian regime types, seek to control so much of the human interactive environment that the object of actually just living day-to-day requires criminal outlook and intent: the authoritarian system creates criminals. What that creates, as described above by Wim Bernasco, is Homo Criminalis: Criminal Man.

The centralization of power and authority does not get an enlightened State but one that becomes more barbaric over time.  Regulations at the highest level of the Nation are the hardest to overturn due to the power of the State's ability to gather income resting behind the enforcement of such regulations and laws.  No matter what the stated set of goals for such laws and regulations are (be they to 'help the poor' or 'clean up the environment' or 'regulate banking') their end result is a profusion of rules and penalties that become denser, more complex and harder to avoid breaking with each and every page added to the mass of the regulatory code.   At each point of government below the Nation State level, there is less income and backing for such laws until you get to the local level of representative government (when you can get representative government and apparatchiks aren't merely appointed from the State).  At the lowest level is your self-governance which is the point of making the plethora of rules, laws and so forth.  Your personal self-governance is to adhere to that of the Nation State's dictates, and you are to have very few choices in your life at all.  For you to survive in such circumstances the rational viewpoint on a day to day basis is to work around the regulations, rules, codes and laws, and circumvent them just to be able to feed yourself and your family.

No matter how 'fair' the tax system is purported to be, it withdraws productive wealth from the private economy and puts it in the unproductive hands of bureaucrats who seek to expand their sphere of influence and power not out of malice but out of bureaucratic necessity to justify their job and those that help to expand the power of the bureaucracy are elevated. This is best described by Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy (from Jerry Pournelle):

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Whenever we hear of cuts that are to be done at the most local of levels, who's jobs are threatened?  Why, at every turn it is the jobs of teachers, policemen, firefighters, and librarians.  Never is it the job of the line supervisor, the secretary, the back office staff, the functionaries, the paper-pushers or those who have entrenched themselves in useless jobs in the bureaucracy.  Not only is the Progressive State tyrannical, but those working in the State apparatus have a vested interest in increasing the power of the State via that very apparatus.  Thus the Progressive State is pernicious not only for the nominal expansion of government power and control mechanisms, but the control mechanisms themselves begin to become the point of the State.  For the USSR the saying was that they had replaced the Czar with the Commissar:  the tyranny of the King for the tyranny of the Bureaucrat and Apparatchik.  And as any level of bureaucracy sees the need to add more layers to itself via various reasons (to increase 'compliance', to increase 'efficiency', to increase 'productivity) what happens, instead, is that additional layers of bureaucracy are created to entrench power and isolate it from scrutiny via not just the public but by the State as well.  Thus those who create the monstrous bureaucracy will, in time, become its victims although the progenitors do not live to become direct victims, their children or great-grandchildren do, and their society becomes a direct victim immediately.

What those is the bureaucracy do not comprehend is that they become as much Homo Criminalis in regards to other parts of the bureaucracy, and they are subjected to the same problems that they inflict on others.  Those who seek more power and authority, more backing for their control systems are, themselves, ground down by it and their very humanity and civilized patina starts to rub thin.

This is not an advanced or modern State of being, but one more akin to the Celestial Emperors of China where the bureaucracy controlled the Nation and the nominal King was more a figurehead and had very little power over the bureaucrats who decided who would be amongst their number and who would not.  While China had many great technologies, the rule of stability that was part and parcel of a wide-ranging bureaucratic State saw technological advances as threatening to the stability of the overall system.  In theory the King or Emperor had absolute power, but the fact on the ground was at the local level the delegated power was used to reinforce the stability of the Empire and actually hinder technological change.  Military technology would still change due to advances by adversaries, but these then became heavily regulated by the bureaucracy in turn.  Yet when thousands, if not tens of thousands of soldiers are cut down due to new technology the very existence of the Empire required advancement.  Even when the top or ruling class was overturned or the Empire invaded successfully, the system of powerful bureaucrats tended to remain as the new rulers also wanted stability.  Until, of course, a radically different culture with highly advanced technology appears that has not the top but the middle in its sights, and then the very guarantors of stability become the victims of that very stable system.

That is the end state of being for such systems: decay, stagnation, a feeling of inward looking support, and a stultification of society so that a very few arts become lauded because nothing dangerous can be created from them.  In the USSR the various factions were a bit more aggressive at the sub-State level, but they all lacked excellence in production, excellence in engineering and excellence in productivity because they did not reward those things but, instead, merely making quotas with whatever quality of goods would pass muster.  Mao in China could kill millions to get compliance and thought he could end the opium trade by just killing everyone in it and their families... and their friends... and yet that trade continues to this day.  China under Mao had a terrorized populace who were forced into absurd schemes of backyard industry (which failed) and then put into factories when he changed his mind.  It is one of the few Nations that has consciously sought to change its demographics via a 'one child policy' and is on the road to demographic suicide in less than a century after implementing such policy.

The tell-tale sign of an overly bureaucratic State appear at the low end, not the high, however, with the Black Market.  The Black Market isn't just men selling dubious goods in back alleys or fake Rolex watches on a blanket on the sidewalk in New York City, but encompasses a wide range of activities from legal, semi-legal to illegal in nature.  Wait, a legal Black Market?  Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

No, a legal Black Market is a way to utilize the rules so as to avoid other parts of them, such is the case with tax evasion.  Tax evasion skews the tempers of Progressives in a twist because it is people using rational means to analyze the system to 'game' it to their advantage while going against the very things the system is purported to do.  I looked at this from the Petty corruption of tyranny and in that I found an article by Pierre Lemieux from the Globe and Mail in Canada in 1994 on the subject of their VAT in Canada called a Goods & Service Tax:

As budget day nears, politicians of all stripes warn us that tax evasion is rampant in Canada. Before he started talking about tax increases, Finance Minister Paul Martin had declared that "hundreds of thousands of otherwise honest people ... have withdrawn their consent to be governed" by escaping in the underground economy.

The problem is that the politicians do not seem to draw the right conclusions. Pressed for money -- actually, nearly bankrupt --, the federal government, as well as some provincial governments, has decided to clamp down on the underground economy. Revenue Minister David Anderson has declared a war on tax evaders.

After shopkeepers defied the law by openly selling smuggled cigarettes in Saint-Eustache, Qué., Bloc Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard came out against what he sees as a new state-cheating culture. He apparently thinks that citizens should always obey the rulers. Indeed, the governing class shows a rare unanimity in bringing the Canadians back under the government's rod of iron.

Yes, we hear similar problems whenever governments choose to spend unwisely, and their answer is always the same:

First, how did tax evasion develop among so docile a people as the Canadians? The answer lies, of course, in the tax burden they have to shoulder. Tobacco, on which federal tax rates have increased by 150% over the last five years, is only the tip of the iceberg. The total tax take by all levels of government now amounts to nearly 40% of the Canadian gross domestic product. If we include the deficits, which are just future taxes, government takes close to one half of what people produce and earn in this country. In two words, tax evasion is a response to tax invasion.

[..]

Galloping regulations are another factor. Some of them come with taxes: Small businesses now have to perform time-consuming GST accounting, and prepare a complex quarterly report. I don't know if we ever were a nation of shopkeepers, but we are certainly becoming one of tax collectors and accountants. Other forms of regulation -- labor regulations, for instance -- make it much more simpler and cheaper to go underground, for consumers and suppliers alike.

The second question is, How could we ever accept such a tax burden in the first place? One hundred or 200 years ago, the great Western thinkers to whom we owe whatever liberty we have left would never have thought this could happen in a free country.

[..]

The third question relates to the state's reaction. Politicians argue that the individuals who do not pay their "fair share" thereby increase the tax burden of other citizens. The main thrust of the coming federal and provincial budgets may well be to increase the effective tax burden under the guise of "fair shares."

This is a naïve cliché which assumes that political and bureaucratic processes naturally lead to the optimal amount of taxes required to finance unanimously demanded public services. What actually happens (at least if we agree with the Public Choice approach in economics) is that the government will take as much as it can, it will charge what the traffic will bear. Governments satisfy minority pressure groups and buy votes through spending. If Canadians in the underground economy were to start paying their "fair" taxes, government revenues and expenses would just increase by the amount of the new taxes. In this perspective, the underground economy is a useful restraint on Leviathan, and a benefit to all taxpayers.

Taxed Enough Already?

Art Laffer indicated that up to a certain level of taxation governments will get increased revenue, but after that point revenue actually decreases per increase in taxation.  Taxes are avoided.  From personal experience I can say that I was welcomed as an outsider by various small businesses in Canada when I visited there during this period as they did not have to pay a tax when foreigners purchased from them.  Taxes were avoided via every legal means possible and the more loopholes the politicians put into the system, the more taxes were avoided by the exploitation of those loopholes beyond just the expected favored class involved.  Germany has seen other artifacts, like people taking their money to foreign banks so as not to face taxation for it in Germany, and Germany got pretty irate about that but could do nothing about it as other regulations were preventing such tracking not just inside Germany but in other Nations, as well.  That fellow that scored a crate of fake Rolex watches and selling them on the streets is nothing compared to the weekly income that can be shipped out of a Nation to avoid taxes in those Nations with onerous tax policies.  One gets you red in the face politicians who feel cheated by a system they created, the other gets a small time operator in the slammer for a few months.

Every Nation has a Black Market, which is to say every Nation has goods they wish to restrict and don't want their people to purchase.  Even worse is that most Nations have internal taxation to try and put a penalty on purchasing certain items (liquor, cigarettes) that has a tax stamp on it, and when that happens there are those willing to fake, forge or forget the tax stamp to sell you the good in question and just slightly undercut the fully taxed cost of the good in question.  Hezbollah ran a cigarette smuggling ring from its quarters in Toronto, going to North Carolina to purchase untaxed cigarettes and then sell them in Detroit for a net profit of $10m/yr. remitted to Hezbollah, until they got caught, of course.  The behavior that drives this is rational avoidance of taxes to get a desired good, and when the taxes become high enough, less than legal to illegal means that can deliver that good at a lower price then become something sought after by normal people who consider themselves as not doing a truly illegal activity, just avoiding taxes.

In Poland under the Soviet Bloc the academics and researchers found they could piece together an IBM PC that would do more than their Soviet supercomputer for only a few thousand dollars and a few trips to West Berlin to buy components, not a full computer.  Within 6 months they had a full IBM PC and used the Soviet system to heat their room.   Goods get smuggled in via familial associations, via forms of smuggling, via Black Market money exchanges on the street that give a much better deal in local currency than the State shops do.  Saudi Arabia has smugglers smuggling guns out to terrorists and then finds the same smugglers are smuggling prohibited video cellphones back into the Kingdom for the teenagers who want to know what each other look like before arranging a date.    Similar happens in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Russia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico (although there it is more of smuggling worthwhile goods out to get Black Market arms), the US and Canada.  As seen under Mao you can even make the penalty that of death, not mere taxation and criminal prosecution, and you still can't get rid of the Black Market.

Any Black Market is a warning to the government and the people of the State involved: you are treading on thin ice.  To get public morality requires more than just punishment but the putting forth of a positive moral view and ideology that tells why such morals are positive, what their effects are and how they can be utilized to better society.  Punishment of individuals is a necessary means to protect society, but it is not the creation of a positive public moral environment and, when used to gain that environment, starts to unravel the very public morality it is meant to uphold by creating rational actors seeking prohibited goods at a low cost.  The sales point of such public laws that enforce a moral good via the negative powers granted government is that they lead to a better functioning society.  Like the Laffer Curve that is true, up to a point, and then you get diminishing returns for each new law passing itself off as supporting a positive moral good.  The hard case to make is that something should be legal to purchase, taxed normally, and that you agree to work with your fellow man to create organizations to help others see the problems of using such goods or services, and to reinforce society so that those goods and services become less popular, gains fewer users and slowly dies out.

That is the unwritten law, the leges, and Americans no longer do that as we have come to believe that the written law is all.  And yet all of society, all of civilization, is formed on the leges and common morality and decency, espoused by the majority working towards more people so as to lessen the effects of immoral behavior and consumption of goods leading to immorality.  You can legislate for morality all you want, yet you do not get a moral society from it and, instead, you get bureaucrats.  Really, do you want morality enforced by bureaucrats?  It is so cheap and easy to say 'there ought to be a law' instead of doing something yourself to address the wrongs of society, and that is what Progressives want: your non-involvement in society.  Then they can make up all the rules you have to follow, no thought required from you, until they stop you from doing the necessary things in your life.

Then you become just what they want: Homo Criminalis.

Stop asking government to do the things you should be doing.

These things aren't done because they are easy, they must be done because they are hard and you are the best person to do them.  Only you can create a positive moral environment for yourself and society.  And no law ever passed can stop you from doing that, even if it threatens to kill you... and then you know the State really does see doing moral good as an evil, and it has become, itself, a pure evil in that doing.