Unamended right

There is a fascinating part in the US Constitution (archives.gov) about a right guarantee and it isn't in the Bill of Rights but in the body of the Constitution, itself.  Not even one of the more well known rights.  That is probably why it gets ignored.

It is a direct grant of right to the State Legislatures, and sits way down in Art. V, you know the Amendment process:

Article. V.

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

There, right at the end.

The State is granted equal suffrage in the Senate.

State suffrage at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, meant that individuals chosen via the State Legislatures were the ones doing the representation of the State.  Throughout Art. V the only body that is mentioned at the State level is the State Legislature.

Now Amendment XVI changed the process of choosing Senators:

AMENDMENT XVII

Passed by Congress May 13, 1912. Ratified April 8, 1913.

Note: Article I, section 3, of the Constitution was modified by the 17th amendment.

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.

When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.

Does Amending the process of choosing a Senator abolish the right granted via Art. V to the State Legislatures?

By changing the meaning of Suffrage for a State from Legislature to direct election of the people, the State Legislature is cut out of the decision making process for Senators.  That should be it, right?  I mean you cleverly cut out the State Legislatures and remove their power grant in the Senate in one easy change. 

Yet the State Legislature is the ONLY State level organization mentioned in Art. V and it is specifically considered as having suffrage in Art. V in the Senate.  If Amendment XVII did, indeed, intend to remove the power granted to the State Legislatures for considering Amendments, it could have said so.  This is not normal Senate duty, do remember, but deciding on an Amendment to the Constitution, to which the States were originally granted ways to have a say in it via their Legislatures: via the normal process of voting for it at the State level and via their representative in the Senate.

Sadly I do believe that the States signed away their representation with the move to direct election of Senators.  The idea of popular suffrage and direct election of Senators have left the States without a direct voice in the federal government. 

Yet the original intent of the Amendment process remains via implication of how Legislatures were to choose Senators and the Senators having a direct say via their votes in the Senate in the Amendment process.  So whenever you hear about how the US always 'expands' rights, do remember that it has removed and say from the State Legislature on how to run the Nation not just via normal votes but via Art. V Amendment votes.  If that simple Amendment to give direct elections of Senators didn't remove the State Legislative suffrage right for Amendments, then every single Amendment after Amendment XVII would be brought into question.  Because while the people vote directly on Senators, the sovereignty of the several States rests in their representatives at the level of the State Legislature.  By agreeing to Amendment XVII the State Legislatures agreed to give up part of their say and walk away from the guarantee they had in the Constitution for representation directly.  Their only real recourse is to pass a bill saying that the current Senators don't represent their State and the Consent to let them sit as representatives of the State, not the people of the State but the State as an entity, is withdrawn.

And what State Legislature has the courage to do that?  Really, if you have to gag someone, isn't it better to convince them to gag themselves?  Saves a lot of fuss when you can do that. 

The State Legislatures could still do all sorts of mischief to popularly elected Senators... too bad they keep making sure the gag is tightly in their mouth and that they make it clear that they no longer want to do their jobs of representing their States. 

Even with the consent they gave during the Amendment process, the State Legislatures could still have a say over the representatives of the State in the Senate via the Art. V grant.  That right has been left unamended and still sits in Art. V but by Amendment XVII has been changed from a sovereign exercise of will to representation to one of negating representation if the sovereign no longer believes that its representative is representing it.  Consider this right to be a veto power over a Senator by the State Legislature, because they are the ones to decide if the State is being properly represented for the Amendment process.

The will to exercise this right?  Absent.

What policy in Syria?

Lee Smith notes at The Weekly Standard that Obama's Syria policy is a mess.

I'll go further: Obama doesn't have a policy on Syria.

If we had a policy of doing nothing, we would be doing nothing and Obama would be saying a lot about it.  Instead there is silence.

We have armed the 'rebels' with MANPADs, of course.  Part of the Benghazi debacle that wound up with our Ambassador and 3 others dead was that the US was supporting the transfer of MANPADs from Libya to the Syrian 'rebels' via Turkey.  So there was that policy, which fell flat on its face.  That was the outcome of the Libyan 'policy' which spread al Qaeda and arms into northern Africa with predictable results.  Apparently no one has a real stomach for that sort of outcome with a WMD armed Syria. 

Imagine chemical weapons use spreading through the Middle East by an al Qaeda victorious 'rebel' faction if Obama follows the Libyan policy.

Grand, huh?

So Russia and Iran are backing the Assad regime.

Various others are backing the 'rebels', which are basically al Qaeda backed terrorists and a few renegade military regime members.

And Obama's policy?

You don't really want to back the WMD toting and using Assad.

The rebels aren't what you would call 'westernized' or seeking 'a modern democracy'.

Thus Obama has trouble saying who he would back and why.

So here's an idea that fits with the American tradition and lets you know we have done something, without having to put boots on the ground.

The regime is armed.

The 'rebels' are armed.

The general population is defenseless and unarmed by and large.

It seems that there is one group that really needs protecting that could do a great job on their own if only they had weapons...

The typical US solution?  Arm the population.

A well armed society is a polite society, no?  I mean after the petty tyrants and hot heads get killed off, things get real polite.

That is a viewpoint, of course, and biased on the idea that one's Natural Rights should be backed and that the right to Keep and Bear Arms is fundamental to a civil society, personal defense and liberty for the individual.

Using that the general policy would be: buy up every black market AK-47 on the planet (they go for about $150 used on the black market and are a loss leader), purchase all the surplus ammo (7.62 x 39) that you can get your hands on, photocopy Arabic instruction manuals (French and English to, come to that) and then start airdropping these in cases to every farmhouse, every village, every tent you can get off of satellite.  Leave an additional message that when an area declares itself OPEN and FREE OF THE REGIME AND THE REBELS that more arms and ammo will be airdropped when you leave a BIG SIGN on a nearby hillside or painted on rooftops of SEND MORE, PLEASE.  More or less weekly.

This will:

1) Drain the small arms black market of AK-47s, which has been a big objective of nearly every major power for decades.  Ask Ollie North for help, he can point you to black market arms dealers.

2) It will put a run on AK ammo.  Sorry, that is the way the cookie crumbles.  This is generally a good thing, though, as the regime will be well supplied with 7.62 x 39 and so will the rebels as the AK platform is Russian backed and ubiquitous to any insurgency.  The locals should be able to get more ammo with a few thousand rounds per weapon to start with.  It becomes self-sustaining when rebels or the regime attack such areas with boots on the ground.

3) It breaks up the logjam in Syria no end. The Kurds in Syria have been getting arms from someone (not the US as that would be a rational thing to do, and not the Iraqi government, either, as they are PO'd that this is happening), so with a lot of local reinforcements there should be some fracturing of Syria with a possible aim to creation of a Lesser Kurdistan or a Greater Iraq.  That will distract Iran no end as these areas are generally Sunni in nature, which will change the power balance in the Middle East.

4) It will horrify the Turks as they are backing the 'rebels'.  Sorry, that's payback for what you did with us before OIF.  Obama can point out he is saving them money because it costs a lot to be a part of NATO and the EU.  And sorry about the Kurds getting restless again in Turkey, but, you know, Post World War I treaties and all that.  International Law.  The US didn't sign on to shafting the Kurds.

5) The Left has been so hot about arming those without arms in so many Red areas that it isn't funny.  All under the verbiage of saving 'the people' of a country.  So when you do that directly they will COMPLAIN and it can be pointed out that this is what they have called out for in the past that it isn't funny.  Obama should be good at that, tweaking his old pals and saying that this is the sort of thing they ASKED FOR NOW ISN'T IT?  He's just being ideologically consistent... yeah, as if he had an ideology beyond screw everyone.  But the Left hasn't been well screwed yet and their time is just about here for Obama.  The Royal Shaft of the BOGU group.

6) Obama can jaw about how innocents need to be able to protect themselves against tyrants and terrorists!  And they are Islamic to boot!  America befriends Muslims! Heh.

No this will never happen as it would take a conniving, back-stabbing, double-crossing Lefitst to do this.

Say, wait, don't we have one of those in the White House?

Boy wouldn't that be a great distraction from the NSA, IRS, spy and intimidate YOU policy?  Now people would have something to complain about as he would be FOR gun control at home, but against it abroad.  What a commotion that would cause to try and distract YOU from the spying on YOU scandal and the Amnesty Illegals to Fundamentally Screw YOU legislation that the dipsticks Upon the Hill want to pass to screw YOU over Royally.

Pure and utter chaos would be the result.

Seems that is what Obama wants, no?

So just offering a friendly tip to the President on how to bring it about.

Get a new policy for Syria Mr. President.

Arm the general population.

The "Let Them Figure It Out" policy.

Or the "Lets you and them and those others fight" policy.

Relatively cheap, barely topping a couple of billion which is, what, all the vacations and golf trips the President has taken, combined?  Very cheap as these things go.  Probably has that floating around as excess in someone's budget.  Foreign policy is the President's domain and we aren't actually entering INTO a war, just supplying Humanitarian Aid.  Because the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is a fundamental Human right in need of aid now, isn't it?

This is better than the policy we have.

Because we don't have one.

And, really, do you want to arm al Qaeda backed 'rebels' who love to terrorize the people of Syria?  Haven't they suffered enough under the Assads?  How about letting them have a say in things for once? And you don't even need to 'Nation Build' as you're letting the locals figure out how to do that on their lonesome.  And we get to PO Putin, Iran, al Qaeda, Assad, Hezbollah... wouldn't that be fun?  And they couldn't even complain that we were supplying sophisticated arms, training or much of anything else beyond old fashioned 'vintage' and used AK-47s.  And the Black Market arms dealers will love you until they realize that the US has just made the AK-47 the most expensive small arms to deploy in mass quantities because we bought them all and redistributed them to Syria.  And I do mean every single one that can be purchased by that route: clean out the inventory.  Lock, stock and barrel.  Then start in on the AK-74s.

A well armed people form a polite society.

Want a good outcome in Syria?

Arm the people of Syria to the teeth so that when anyone says anything bad about someone else, the result is immediate and lethal.

Those that are left are polite.

And maybe a bit trigger happy, given, but that gets you that polite society.

Arm them all.  Let them figure it out as WE SURE AS HELL CAN'T.

Process that Preserves

I've written about the problems of the NSA surveillance of Americans in Presumed Guilty, and will switch from that to the man who actually revealed the NSA PRISM program and fled to Hong Kong: Edward Snowden.

I am not going to pre-judge his actions, but note that they are in violation of the law with presumable harm to National Security involved.  Like any other person accused of a crime he deserves his day in court and I recommend that he do come to a US Embassy and publicly relinquish himself for a public trial.  It will take time for the enormity of his actions to hit Mr. Snowden and when that happens it is my dearest wish that he does come in from the cold.

Really that is the best course of action as the one he is on now leaves him open to accusations and no closure that a trial provides.  If he truly believes he did the right thing then, while he does have much to fear from the legal system, it is a system and it has a process to it.  It is a process that preserves rights and liberty of our citizens.

As I outlined in Presumed Guilty, Amendments IV, V and VI put together the legal system to be followed with in the US and it is one of presumed innocence at the start with the onus of proof of wrongdoing falling to the accuser.  It is a process where the accuser must gather evidence, seek warrants for more information from a judge, and present that evidence in a public court so that the accused has an opportunity for a public trial by jury.  There have been numerous prior proceedings involving secrecy laws and the information within them and the procedure of reading on a judge, attorneys and jury is well understood and well known.

Truly the government need only show that the program was compromised.

I presume that Mr. Snowden's defense was that in his view the program was unconstitutional either in its basis or execution, and that his Oath required him to reveal the program to the American people as a whole.  Most of the attention is being put to Amendment IV:

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

As Mr. Snowden is pointing out that the NSA collection of information on American citizens in a wholesale manner is not only not allowable without a warrant, but that the whole of the people cannot be suspected for crimes of particulars done by individuals.  Thus even if the FISA court gave a Warrant for such activities, that Warrant is in violation of the Constitution: Warrants are for cases of individuals or small groups, not the entire population of the US.  If the NSA sought such a broad Warrant then it is in violation of the Constitution by seeking such and not narrowing its scope down to particulars and individuals.  If there is a Constitutional breach at that point it can have one of three sources, it it has happened:

1 – Judicial lack of oversight and not putting a narrow scope to data collection to protect the liberty and freedom of Americans.  You are presumed innocent of a crime and when the Executive asks for data on you via a warrant you are then suspected of a crime.  The entirety of the American people cannot be suspected of a crime and it is incumbent on the Executive to narrow the procedure down to likely individuals and their associates, not the whole of the People.  By not recognizing this basic piece of logic, the Judicial branch in authorizing such a Warrant can be found in breach of the Constitution.  At that point the Warrant is rescinded and all individuals not associated with suspected terrorists are removed from the data stores in their entirety, including all back-ups.

2 – Executive branch problems can fall into the area of not interpreting the law correctly and creating an unconstitutional execution of it via programs.  In this instance a law would be Constitutional but the PRISM concept would be violating basic protections and freedoms of the People as a whole and in their individual particulars.  Any program so ill-crafted as to need all of the data on all of the people to find the very few who may be supporting terrorists is so ill-conceived that it points to a basic and systemic problem in not just the program but in those who created and authorized it.

3 – Legislative works are not always found to be Constitutional and Congress may have given a law that contravenes the basic protections of the American people as a whole and as individuals.  The entire scope of the law may be so ill-created and ill-conceived that no one doing the process of approving it in Congress realized just how wrong-headed it was.  However if Congress did craft the law properly, but was not informed of the scope of the resulting program and what it entailed, then that is a failure of the Executive branch to properly inform the Legislative branch about the implementation of the program.  If the law, itself, is the fault then it lies with Congress at the very passage of it and all programs and functions created by it go away, and the data stores are destroyed.  A lack of Executive accountability, however, puts the Executive at jeopardy for not performing a duty to Congress as required by Congress so that Congress can exercise oversight.  In this instance a program and law can be Constitutional but both Mr. Snowden and all who are in the Executive reporting chain can be held accountable for not properly accounting the program to Congress.

These are the possible problems that Mr. Snowden may have seen and the remedy for his defense is not in Amendment IV, the basis for his revealing the program which he sees as problematical, but in Amendment VI:

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

This procedure in which the prosecution hands over all its collected evidence to the accused and opens those items up to further scrutiny by the accused is known as 'discovery'.  When getting a Warrant the Executive seeks to discover more information about someone and when it accuses them that information is then handed over.  That scrutiny is critical because the defense must be allowed access to exculpatory information in the way of witnesses and documents.

In this case the discovery would presumably happen on the PRISM program within the NSA.

The scope of it would be limited to those documents and procedures that detail the entire history of the program from its original emplacement in a Bill and authorized by Congress, to the implementation and creation of it, to how it functioned so that the Executive demonstrates that it is doing a responsible job in executing the program and properly informing Congress of it on a basis set by Congress.

The defense would not actually want much in the way of things like hardware, software, and who is running which piece of equipment as those would be a distraction and not relevant to the defense.  What is wanted is the high level Legislative enabling Bills and then how the Executive processed those to programs, with given scope and necessary high level overview of the program, and then how it proceeded over time.

The defense has multiple ways to demonstrate that Mr. Snowden operated under his Oath and duties to the Constitution and need but show how the scope of PRISM contravenes the power granted to the federal government in any single particular: with just one Constitutional problem he is vindicated.

An accuser has the power of the State behind them, but in this case it would be relatively open and shut if there is a strong belief that PRISM did all of the following:

1 – Is a Constitutional power granted to Congress.

2 – The Executive properly carried out the power that Congress enacted.

3 – The Executive properly ran the program within the scope of the power grant from Congress for the program.

4 – That no Warrants exceeded the Constitutional limits placed upon the NSA.

5 – That the Judicial branch did not improperly authorize any Warrant for the PRISM program.

6 – That the Executive branch kept Congress properly informed about the program so that Congress could give scrutiny to it so that the program was being run to their satisfaction.

Even though 6 is not a killer to getting a guilty verdict, it then opens the entirety of the reporting chain to prosecution.  And that opens up whole bunches of cans of worms because when the NSA goes rogue and lies to Congress, there is a huge problem in the National Security establishment, all the way up to the DNI who said that such programs didn't even exist nor collect data on American citizens.

So it is my dearest and most sincere wish that Mr. Snowden turn himself in because his worries of Triad contacts inside the US political establishment are valid, and drones are not the only thing in the clandestine arsenal that can take out an individual overseas.  And even Russia isn't safe, either, come to that.

If you are a supporter of the PRISM program then you want Mr. Snowden brought in for trial because you believe it will withstand Constitutional scrutiny.  Really, there is little to worry about in that instance if you believe that.

If you are not a supporter of the PRISM program then you want Mr. Snowden to come in on his own and then support him to get the best crack team of lawyers who know the security laws and how to dance them.  People used to chasing down bureaucratic paper trails, using documents to build a defense and showing just what the scope of the PRISM program actually is.  You don't get that with finger-pointing and argument, but with a court case.

And if you simply want Justice to be served, you want Mr. Snowden to come in or be brought in to trial.  If he acted properly in his assessment of the PRISM program, then he will be vindicated and the program shattered in public disclosure after he is found innocent.  And if he is guilty and the program is Constitutional and legally constructed and run, then the security apparatus will ensure that the information in the trial doesn't see the light of day.

If the entire process, including the Judiciary, has been corrupted thoroughly, then a trial will also show that, quite well.

Being on the run is only a temporary phenomena and you either find a safe haven, get brought in to trial or wind up dead because you know far too much and a trial would reveal that and possibly more.  If Mr. Snowden winds up dead, you will know that is exactly the case.  And then we have a real problem on our hands because someone no longer wants the process to preserve the system.

Freedom vs. Utopia

I've been continuing on with The Moral Foundations of Politics presented by Professor Ian Shapiro at Yale as part of their Open Yale courses and have now gotten into the post-Classical views on politics, leaving the 19th century behind as such propositions as Utilitarianism and Marxism are both seen as so flawed as to not offer a complete nor satisfactory means to remove politics from society.  Indeed, that singular goal of turning science into a means of replacing politics proved to be ill-founded, ill-thought out and when the scientific method is rigorously applied to either they both fall short of their goals of removing politics from the affairs of Man.  Simply put, you can't get rid of it due to the complexities of societies and individuals and the fact that valuations on such affairs cannot be rendered objectively but subjectively.  Both the maximization of social utility and the creation of the bureaucratic self-ending State prove to have so many problems as they are both a threat to human liberty because of the underlying principles involved.  Thus in the 20th century, while adherents to both ideals try to find a way forward with them, their ability to have good outcomes in the world lead to problems that show philosophies of Man that are unable to deal with Man as he is.

From that point Professor Shapiro moves to a late 20th century thinker called Robert Nozick, who proposed the utilization of subjectivity and Man's freedom to analyze just what sort of political system and results one gets starting from just about any point in the political spectrum.  Instead of trying to work through a mechanical system, like both Utilitarianism and Marxism that assert a methodology of approach to render objective means, Nozick proposes a subjective approach utilizing post-Newtonian conceptions in the way of Einstein's 'thought experiments'.  His goal is not to step outside of society and politics but to temporarily put it aside and ask a fundamental question: what is the purpose of the State?

The thought experiment entails having you, the individual, ask yourself what sort of situation you would be in if no State government existed.  Yes, it is an impossible situation but this is a thought experiment, not a real world goal to reach.  If every politician, judge, lawyer and political activist suddenly disappeared in a puff of smoke along with every bureaucrat and every tome of laws and regulations they created, why would you need them?  What is their purpose?  And what would your reaction be in this case where the State, as we know it and as has been known to every generation of mankind, suddenly evaporated?  It is a profound question and the answers you get start to show major lines of thought in the 1980's and forward to today, but not in the mainstream of political thought until just recently.

In that Stateless state you would be back to your Natural Rights and Liberties and must rely on self-governance.  But that is no assurance against Man in that State of Nature (red of tooth and claw) and to protect yourself you must actually do that and also protect those things you create that allow you to survive.  Otherwise you would fall prey to Savage Man because that is the state of being you have entered into.  To protect yourself you might band together with others who are like minded with you to help, but then the burden of protecting all of those things you own as individuals and each of your individual lives falls to you, and you have more and better things to do with your liberty than that, don't you?  Thus you may find others who have decided on a division of labor as a means to achieve this end (remember how Marx hated that?) so that they can protect your belongings as you went about doing other things.  You form a Stateless contract with such a group as there is no one to enforce it other than each other, but you can work on a principle of accountability and of one's word being their bond, with proof of that only coming over time.  From that the basis of protective organizations starts and we could liken this to Mafia families or bands of Warlords and their personal followers.

What happens in this state of being without a State?  This is, perhaps, the Anarchist dream Utopia but it has a problem: there is no one to really enforce the contract.  Worse still is that to gain market and expand, as any organization must due to internal needs and requirements of administration and covering ever more people as they become popular, such bands then start to compete for market space.  What happens when rival protection rackets start to go after the same territory?  Conflict.  And that is what happens with these protection organizations, as they may start at a low-level of threats and intimidation to gain market (or go out of existence as stronger organizations prevail) until open conflict ensues.  In this way the more capable organizations will expand and flourish to cover more and more population until they cover a society.  At that point there is a power dynamic change as the legitimizing power to enforce protection can be used against a population, but that population also has some capability to withhold funding the organization at large to hold it accountable.  In either case you get the State. 

From a start of pure Statelessness you get the State and yet it is just that one power and function that has been granted to it: to protect one's life and property from others harming them.  This is a Utilitarian conception of John Stewart Mill and this is the State that protects it: The Night Watchman State.  And who watches these Watchmen?  All members of society.

Such a minimalist State allows maximum freedom to exercise individual liberty, protects all members of society and their property (although you never lose the responsibility, duty and right of self-protection), but otherwise does nothing else and is held in check from expansion by the population at large.  While not a new conception of such a State, it comes with a far different set of underpinnings than Enlightenment or Classical or even Ancient views of it since it is a State in thought experiment only, not a goal nor objective to achieve: this is not a rigorous methodology to create a new realm of morality in politics, but an analytical tool to analyze what is or is not moral in politics.

If one steps away, mentally, from their current society and asks if any idea is good or bad to each individual in society, then they must look at the greatest harm done as well as the greatest good generated on any political question.  This is not a means with an end, but a pure tool to wield in cutting away questions of their normal externalities and get to the actual propositions involved.  Thus something like, say, 'should there be a minimum wage?' or 'should there be unemployment benefits?' can be asked not by pointing out to the 'good' that can be done but also to looking at the harm it can do, and no political proposition or law is harmless.  Passing legislation to say that rabbits are cute is not the same as enforcing a taking of wages to fund the unemployed or to require redirection of resources directly to a minimum wage as a forced part of any contract: there is harm done and to a large number of people and then only to benefit a minority of the population by removing liberty or the fruits of liberty at the direction of government.  That is a moral question and an ethical one that brings home the actual question: is it right to take away money that represents a person's time spent in productive labor to give it to someone who has lost their job?  That is actually not a simple question to ask as it entails lost productivity of not only individuals and a society in an attempt to give temporary recompense to those who have lost a job.  That is a harm.  Anything done to an individual that removes their liberty or its creations is a harm as it is those very things that the State is supposed to PROTECT.  Why?  You just went through that thought experiment and can see that the best and most minimal thing a State is supposed to do is PROTECT your life and the artifacts of time spent with your liberty, not take them and give them to others.

As you are now outside the actual system (with thought experiments) and are not contained within it you also get to ask: how does this effect me without my knowing where I will be in the economic scale once I step back into the active society?  Remember this is a thought experiment and while performing it you have no attributes of the society involved: you have no class, you have no social standing, you have no religion, you own nothing and you are detached in all ways from that society that you can manage so as to try and render a moral judgment on a political activity from all parts of society.  Yes you will have difficulty doing that detachment, which is why such an analytical tool requires rigor in its use and you must self-analyze any bias you bring to the table.  It is a tool that cuts into not just political morality but into your own moral basis as an individual, and when it cuts it can cut deeply.

Now consider a real world example of a famous professional athlete who has put into his contract that every person coming to a home game puts a quarter into a box for the player to watch the game.  This contract is negotiated between the player and the team (as it is a team sport) and they are agreeable to it.  You, as a fan, get to decide if you want to go to those games and see a world famous athlete play in full knowledge that you'll be paying that athlete 25 cents.  This is a Pareto Perfect situation in which everyone gets to decide if this additional cost is worth the result.  It is also a form of promise from the player to play well as if he can get enough people excited with his play to fill the arena every night, then he makes more money over his career.  There is no force to enter into the contract, and yet it is agreeable to the player and the team.  You have a choice as to paying what amounts to a private tax that is a very small cost compared to the ticket price, and 25 cents isn't all that much.  The player makes millions of dollars in this method.  It also has the benefit of being a real-world example as this is what Wilt Chamberlain had in his contract, so you can't say that it isn't possible.

That player gains wealth beyond what he is guaranteed to get from his salary or wages from people just showing up to watch him play home games.  The team makes far more money from the increase in ticket sales and has a strange form of personal commitment from the player to continue playing at top form or even improve.  The fan gets better on-court play that is more entertaining to them from the player.  Does Wilt Chamberlain deserve all that money?  He did earn it after all, by utilizing a freely negotiated part of a contract acceptable to all involved.  Does anyone think that he isn't entitled to that and to be protected from its being seized in order to, say, give it to the poor?

This example is a powerful one as it demonstrates a principle of freedom allowing for the unequal distribution of wealth via freely negotiated contracts.  It is, perhaps, the largest game-changer in the approach to morality in politics that anyone has developed and is one of the keenest tools to pull apart redistributive systems.  Those on the Left would criticize Wilt Chamberlain and say that he did not deserve to have such accumulated wealth and that the State should have some say in how it is used (through taxation, say) even though these are negotiated payments to see an ephemeral activity for the temporary enjoyment of those watching a game.  It is a price paid for enjoyment and the social experience of a game, not productive activity which irks the social moralists even more.  The goal of those moralists is to reach a Utopian end-state (usually a Marxist one as it involves forcible redistribution of wealth) and they have just run into the worst kind of roadblock that can be put in front of them: the death of the Utopian end-state ideal.

With this tool a different Einsteinian 'thought experiment' can progress and it is one that can be used against a Utopian end-state.  Lets make that a State where everyone is exactly equal in material wealth, have all their needs met and contribute accordingly. 

Now put in place the freedom of contract. 

What do you get? 

Unequal results, the accumulation of wealth and the end of the level end-state which disappears in relatively short order as everyone makes subjective decisions on what to do with their freedom to exercise their liberty. 

The great thing is that Mr. Nozick lived to see this come about in the fall of the Eastern Bloc in such places as Poland and Czechoslovakia where State owned businesses were apportioned out by one-share per citizen.  Each citizen had equal ownership in these businesses to do with as they pleased with the shares.  Some put them under mattresses, others burned them, others used them as toilet paper and others started purchasing them.  Within 5 years those firms that actually had any productive capability had gained majority owners, and not through an original wealth imbalance (as was the case in Russia) but through the free play of a free market starting out in an egalitarian starting condition.  It didn't last long.  Nor does any equal distribution system of wealth as human freedom is its death knell when liberty is allowed to be freely exercised.

Any State that violates its minimalist being to redistribute wealth is thus in conflict with human liberty and freedom.  And even if it reaches some desired form of 'equality' across all of mankind, the moment that freedom is allowed back in, then the entire thing will evaporate in short order without the force of the State to back it.

You really can learn a lot just by wanting to find out about abstruse areas of thought like the moral basis of politics.

And, yes, this is also the death knell for any attempt at 'collective' humanity that isn't coercive and authoritarian, despotic in all ways to the individual.  The greatest tool to wield against it?  Individual liberty.

It was once a revolutionary idea.

And it still is.

Liberty, security and those giving both away

“Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security”

- Benjamin Franklin (via Thinkexist)

The rights secured against government are particular and many, especially with regard to the US federal government and by incorporation to the States.  Additionally those powers not granted to the federal government are retained by the States and the people.  These are not new securities, by any means, and many go back not just to the Magna Carta and the pre-existing contracts between the people and their sovereigns, but also through the works of the post-Westphalian West that helped to delineate the differences between Moral Law, Natural Law and Civil Law.  As Natural rights and liberty are granted to us because we are part of the natural universe, there is no way that those rights can be severed from people as individuals and we can only agree to not exercise certain rights and liberties when we create government at the personal level and then at every level thereafter.  Of all governments it is self-government that is the strongest since it starts with each individual.  All other governments must utilize exterior power to enforce any larger agreements upon individuals as governments.  As Tom Paine puts it, government is the Punisher and all governments are created from the bowers of the ruins of paradise.

Freedom of speech is one of the prime rights secured against government as it is the way we communicate our inner-most feelings and ideas with each other as people.  As a people we are guaranteed that communication via the freedom of the press so that all means to communicate with each other are open to us.  With these two is the freedom of religion, the right to communicate our inner-most feelings to the Creator.  Together these are all descriptive of freedom of thought, the freedom to be oneself to oneself as you are.  Individuals who secure these rights are known as citizens, others that do not secure them properly are subjects as they allow their interior self to be defined by exterior forces.  Yet, within the heart of every subject is a free man, a citizen, if they would but allow themselves the freedom to think as they will unfettered by exterior forces.  This is the most powerful of rights as it allows self-direction, self-creation and the ability to reshape the very world by daring to find a way to do the impossible.

In our world there are those threatened by citizens, by free men, who dare to express their own ideas freely.  This is not the mischievous negative liberty to scare others (the yelling fire in a crowded theater paradigm) which is an attempt to subjugate others to fear of physical pain so as to cause pain.  In that same category is the incitement to riot which is a calling on the fear and hatred of others of some object, person, people, race, religion, or other demonized other of the moment.  Nor is there a thing known as 'hate speech' as there are only hateful people, and such people deserve the right and liberty to espouse their inner-most self so others can see just how small and hateful such people are.  Such speech is not applauded, but is counter-acted by various means, including just pointing out how hateful and baseless it is.  Thus even the worst, most vile of speech is not remedied by censorship on the outside, but through reasoning of individuals to understand just what the impacts of such speech are and why it is not good for individuals to do it.  Either that or learn to cope with the effects of such speech, that choice is up to individuals, not governments.

Current events always bring forward Franklin and his wisdom is one to be heeded as he helped to bring so much common sense to our Nation and because it is common sense and easy to understand it accords within free people to abide by it.  Events are within a time frame or period, and yet how we decide to deal with them help to chart the course of ourselves, our Nation and all humanity.  Thus your decision on how to deal with speech you do not agree with is up to you.  Sadly, there are those who want to vest that into bureaucracy we call government.  Take Eric Posner, at Slate, in has article of 25 SEP 2012 The World Doesn’t Love the First Amendment:

The universal response in the United States to the uproar over the anti-Muslim video is that the Muslim world will just have to get used to freedom of expression. President Obama said so himself in a speech at the United Nations today, which included both a strong defense of the First Amendment and (“in the alternative,” as lawyers say) and a plea that the United States is helpless anyway when it comes to controlling information. In a world linked by YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, countless videos attacking people’s religions, produced by provocateurs, rabble-rousers, and lunatics, will spread to every corner of the world, as fast as the Internet can blast them, and beyond the power of governments to stop them. Muslims need to grow a thick skin, the thinking goes, as believers in the West have done over the centuries. Perhaps they will even learn what it means to live in a free society, and adopt something like the First Amendment in their own countries.

But there is another possible response. This is that Americans need to learn that the rest of the world—and not just Muslims—see no sense in the First Amendment. Even other Western nations take a more circumspect position on freedom of expression than we do, realizing that often free speech must yield to other values and the need for order. Our own history suggests that they might have a point.

Note that first part I put into boldface, about the means of communication and what is said: that is the power of free speech and the press, both.   I will repeat it as it is a complete logic construct in its own right:

In a world linked by YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, countless videos attacking people’s religions, produced by provocateurs, rabble-rousers, and lunatics, will spread to every corner of the world, as fast as the Internet can blast them, and beyond the power of governments to stop them.

Without a free press the ability to disseminate ideas to point out tyrannical moves to punish people to think freely is then put into the very hands of those who seek more power via government.  Indeed, if government has not the power to stop such speech, as Mr. Posner implies, then there is no governmental remedy for such speech.  That is pure and absolute logic and proposing to make law of any sort that intrudes into this realm is backward, not by my logic but by that proposed by Mr. Posner.

The second part I highlighted is a call for self-censorship in appeasement of those who cannot or will not handle other people's freedoms well.  That is, individuals must censor themselves so as not to arouse the hatreds of those who will find any reason or rationale to express rage.  If it is not a video it is cartoons.  If not cartoons it is a book.  If not a book, then a poem.  The point is that it isn't the medium of expression that is at fault, nor those doing the speaking, but those doing the listening or receiving of such information that they cannot stand you not thinking and believing as they do.  To censor oneself in the face of such barbaric rage that seeks to impose its beliefs on others by silencing it is to give up that most especial of freedom: the freedom to be oneself.

That is not a 'response' but appeasement in the face of barbarism.

This is inviting more barbaric activity by becoming silent and passive.

It is acquiescing to barbaric actions by silencing oneself about them.

And no free man would ever consent to doing that.

This is not an 'alternative': it is inviting the death of civilization via the veto of the violent and intolerant.

To ask people to give away such rights and the liberty to use them, after going through the vagaries of the Left and Right, Mr. Posner puts this up as a reason to become silent in the face of barbarism:

We have to remember that our First Amendment values are not universal; they emerged contingently from our own political history, a set of cobbled-together compromises among political and ideological factions responding to localized events. As often happens, what starts out as a grudging political settlement has become, when challenged from abroad, a dogmatic principle to be imposed universally. Suddenly, the disparagement of other people and their beliefs is not an unfortunate fact but a positive good. It contributes to the “marketplace of ideas,” as though we would seriously admit that Nazis or terrorist fanatics might turn out to be right after all. Salman Rushdie recently claimed that bad ideas, “like vampires … die in the sunlight” rather than persist in a glamorized underground existence. But bad ideas never die: They are zombies, not vampires. Bad ideas like fascism, Communism, and white supremacy have roamed the countryside of many an open society.

The First Amendment is a securing of our Natural right of freedom of self, which is independent of the US Constitution.  The so-called 'contingency' misses the fact that this right had become an established one under the common law, with roots dating back not just to the Magna Carta but to the earliest law frameworks worked out in the House of Wessex.  In fact the concept that is embodied in this framework of law is that known as a 'contract' between the people and their government.  Contracts have varied over time, yes, and the extent of the limits of government start with these very first contracts that stipulate a concept of there being no taxation without representation by the governed to agree to such taxes.  The changes in these contracts and the limits of government are not ones on paper as those only come after countless changes of government, kings, and virtual despots.  These agreements are written after the blood has been spilled, victors found, and then limits on victory also found.  This Anglo-Saxon concept of limiting government and getting representation into it can be dated back to the 9th Century AD.  Where other peoples were having their laws and taxes dictated to them by government, the Anglo-Saxons were putting government on notice that it is by the consent of the governed.  As a Swedish King acknowledges that the Crown cannot go where the people do not want it to go and that the head wearing the Crown is liable to the same laws as the governed.

The Universality of Natural rights only came after 1648 and the Great Peace of Westphalia that got government out of using religion to gain more power and prestige for the rulers via religion.  This post-Westphalian European concept marries up with the English Common Law very well, as the latter is based on low-level contractual assurance, checks, balances and agreement, not sovereign dictates from the ruler.  With the Enlightenment the Natural Law is seen as universal and, thusly, the rights and liberty that they endow go to every man at every time, if they have but the wisdom to see them for what they are.  This is not a dogma but a piece of knowledge that put to an end the Divine Right Monarchy concept and helped to install a concept of sovereign power being accountable to the governed.  It is not universal because of dogma, the dogma comes from the understanding of the self-evident universality of these rights.  Clawing out positive rights from the negative power of government has been a fight going on for nearly two millennia, not since 1787 or 1776 or 1648.

In seeking censorship, Mr. Posner puts forward that 'bad ideas never die'.  That is correct.  And censorship only makes them more attractive, not less, if the Banned in Boston booklist is any measure of such things.  Bad ideas need to be countered, discussed, and the reason they are bad refreshed on a continual basis so that people know why they are bad ideas.  Not doing so, not speaking out against the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and lesser tyrannical systems like the Ba'athists that grew from Nazism, ensures that you get lovely artifacts like a President having a Mao Christmas tree ornament in the White House, or children wearing apparel festooned with Che the torturer and killer on them.  You can't stop a bad idea by not talking about them, by not calling attention to how bad they are, by not seeking to show how bad they are by the fact that those you seek to talk to will call you racist, phobic or any of a million other names to distract from the fact they are unwilling to talk about how bad their ideas actually are.  Not talking about them allows them to spread because they are malignant and when not countered by simple logic their interior emotional venom allows people to justify all sorts of activities.

Like invading the grounds of Embassies.

Like killing Ambassadors and other protected individuals, which is an Act of War.

Like mass murder.

Like subjugation of the meek by tyrants.

In the end Mr. Posner puts this out:

The final irony is that while the White House did no more than timidly plead with Google to check if the anti-Muslim video violates its policies (appeasement! shout the critics), Google itself approached the controversy in the spirit of prudence. The company declined to remove the video from YouTube because the video did not attack a group (Muslims) but only attacked a religion (Islam). Yet it also cut off access to the video in countries such as Libya and Egypt where it caused violence or violated domestic law. This may have been a sensible middle ground, or perhaps Google should have done more. What is peculiar it that while reasonable people can disagree about whether a government should be able to curtail speech in order to safeguard its relations with foreign countries, the Google compromise is not one that the U.S. government could have directed. That’s because the First Amendment protects verbal attacks on groups as well as speech that causes violence (except direct incitement: the old cry of “Fire!” in a crowded theater). And so combining the liberal view that government should not interfere with political discourse, and the conservative view that government should not interfere with commerce, we end up with the bizarre principle that U.S. foreign policy interests cannot justify any restrictions on speech whatsoever. Instead, only the profit-maximizing interests of a private American corporation can. Try explaining that to the protesters in Cairo or Islamabad.

Again, note the bolded part of this.  Google, as a corporate entity (which is to say an incorporated person) exercised judgment and did what it thought was best.  This is a very exercise of the First Amendment right of Google which is a positive exercise of that right.  Of course this isn't what the government we currently have would have wanted, but so what?  Our rights do not come from government, we only ask that it protect those rights.  And the ability to exercise prudence, caution and adapt circumspection to individual actions is fully and completely within the realm of individuals.

But Mr. Posner decries that very 'profit making entity', which means that if Google were a charitable outfit, that its decisions would be OK?  Those are incorporated entities, as well, yet they do not seek a profit.  The implication is that the US government should impose laws on corporations to make them abide by the will of government policy.  Yet that is not a power handed to the federal government via the contract we call the US Constitution.  If the US government wishes to restrict all civil communications with certain governments then it can do so, of course, but that isn't what Mr. Posner is seeking via his construction of the equation.  He is posing that corporations should become an arm of government policy.  That means every religious organization, every charity, every small business, every thing that we do when we agree to work together and incorporate an entity comes under the control of the US government for speech and, by implication, all foreign policy.  Yet it has not the power to do so because we do not grant such powers to the government.  Nor to any government.

What you hear is the beg for totalitarianism under the guise of anti-capitalism.  Even worse it is a begging to destroy the meaning of our contracts writ small, between individuals, and writ large, between the people and their government.  Mr. Posner doesn't seek a trade in liberty for security, but a trade in liberty for tyranny with no interceding points.

One Step Out

You are prepared for the worst of times, now, or you will find yourself in a rush over the next 2 months to get prepared.

I've gone over the basics before and it comes down to survival level preparation, not the 'do I have a few days of food around the house?' sort of preparation, although that is a necessary precondition it is not sufficient to longer-term survival.  This longer-term stuff deals with preparation of food, water, fuel, sanitary supplies, medicines, weapons, ammunition, and necessary rugged clothing to get through the worst your local climate can hand you.  I am in the last stages of energy preparation and getting in efficient refrigerator and freezer space to run off of solar units.  I am lacking in one or two 'nice to have' things (an end of civilization vehicle capable of getting through an EMP) but otherwise will be set for whatever the future brings in one month.

That is worst case scenario planning.

I will not go into a 'best case' scenario, but the moderate road to the long slog out of our dire circumstances is finally appearing.  It will be a long slog, make no mistake about it, and there will be a change in our short-term outlook due to necessity at the National, State, local and personal level.  The National level is the easiest to encompass and has the most number of 'knowns' to it, which means that examination of probabilities are based on where we are at, what we know of the situations involved, and what can be done to ameliorate them.  What won't be happening on a fast scale, although over 20 years it is a more than faint possibility, is a federal government 'reset button' being hit to make each and every department and each and every law with its regulations tie directly back to the US Constitution.  Getting back to Constitutionally limited government is a goal, not a destination, in that it can never be fully reached, there will always be more to cut and there will be constant vigilance necessary to stop backsliding.  With that said, the easy stuff is also the 'hard stuff' to enumerate.

- Social spending – This is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (M&Ms), welfare (under multiple programs), unemployment benefits, and any other program that is meant to redistribute wealth from taxpayers to the poor, needy and those who generally don't pay income tax.  Yeah, they pay FICA, so?  It is a tax, not necessarily income tax (although the distinction is fine) and the program it funds is in the red and will go completely insolvent in the near future.  That is true of all the 'entitlements' that no one is actually entitled to, and they are all taxing and spending programs when all the feel good veneer is rubbed away.  The worst are the M&Ms as they have been one of the prime causes for raising the cost of medical care through the 'help' of government being unwilling to pay the full cost of care for those in the programs thus raising the price for everyone else.  Add in the subsidization of medical 'insurance' via the tax code, and no one knows exactly what medical care costs any longer as no one is willing to pay an unburdened price for it and the burdened cost is already built into the system.

Solutions to social spending are various, but they all include keeping those 'in the system' in it, and restructuring to abolishing the rest of the system.  One of the reasons I caution to get stocked up months or a year in advance of necessary, daily medical supplies is that something is going to have to give and you don't know what will come out the other side.  Moving to a user-choice based system is necessary and mandatory as the various governments have demonstrated a stark incapacity in actually knowing what they are doing in the health care arena.  You own your body, and caring for it is your problem, and as your property that keeps you tied to this world you might want to stop letting other people decide your fate for you.  When government controls your health care in any way, shape or form, it controls you.  Retirement is something that you must consider for yourself, sans government, so that no matter what government tells you that you must do, you are prepared to thumb your nose and say to it 'go away, my life is my own'.  The idea of retirement may come to be obsolete within two decades if, and only if, we survive past this time of trouble.  That is a ray of hope, for those of you looking, and it goes beyond retirement to medicine, more on that in a bit.

- Industry, energy, natural resource utilization – Federal restrictions based on feel-good ideals and bad science are leading to a catastrophe in the US for energy use.  That for a Nation that just might have the greatest reserves of coal, natural gas and, yes, oil on the planet.  A cynic in the 1980's pointed out that we are exhausting the rest of the world's supply, first, so that ours will be the only one left once the rest of the world can no longer get to the easy stuff.  There is a glimmer of truth in that, sad to say, but never has it been taken to such immediately destructive ends as we are in today.  Basically the idea that the federal government has purview over these areas of the economy flies in the face of limited government power distribution, in which the States and the people get those things that are few we hand to the federal government.  Regulation, politics at the National level, and a religious fervor based on junk science and bad faith are now putting the US in extreme peril of a catastrophic energy increase.

The basics of getting out are clear and simple: hand these things back to the States and those few cross-State concerns that do not tread upon federal domains can be worked on by the States in the plural.  Federalism is the number one answer to these and many other problems, and by shifting the scale to the more local States there is an overhead burden removed from it as local economics will dictate results.  Did it take an EPA to clean up the Cuyahoga River?  Yes.  The Ohio EPA did that, and beat the federal government by years by seeing this as a problem long before the leftist song singers arrived as that burning of the river had been a frequent event.  A pro-active State government utilized its powers (which are many) to deal with a problem tailored to local conditions.  Worked, too.  The States have demonstrated that for off-shore oil exploration that their record is superb for near coastal waters and stringent as well.  Perhaps they can apply that to 'economic zone' waters off their coasts as well, and tailor local solutions and enforcement to their needs.  Alaska doesn't have the same problems as Louisiana or Florida, so why have the same straight-jacket of regulations applied there or anywhere?  The States can serve as a hotbed on getting their lands back by asking the federal government, per parcel, to show where the State legislature actually allowed the federal government to hold that land.  Or, in a lovely twist, just declare 'eminent domain' on those lands and take them out of federal control.  As on land, private drilling is now yielding great returns on investment, perhaps it is time for the States to remember that they OWN that land and that grants to the federal government can be rescinded.

- The weeds of regulation – There are numerous departments and agencies within the federal government that have little useful purpose.  Energy, Education, Labor, HUD, choice parts of Interior... plus quasi-government organizations that do things out of the reach of Congress like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Sallie Mae, Ginnie Mac, Federal Reserve.  When the Federal Reserve tells Congress it won't print money to cover new debt, and then prints money to cover new debt, you have a purely rogue institution that is opaque to outside scrutiny dictating the health of the economy to the citizens.  These and a host of other organizations for the Arts, Humanities, and other educational venues all need to be cut, the quasi-governmental agencies turned into stock based companies and the Federal Reserve slowly relieved of its power of diluting the dollar.

Some of these can come quickly, just by cutting cash off to them in the budgetary cycle.  Others, like the Federal Reserve, that have proved to be openly hostile to the American public and our currency, need to be ground down and if not out of existence all together then given competition by establishing other banks to take over similar duties and making them all accountable to stock and bond holders that must be US citizens.  Removing the power of government to put quasi-governmental agencies in charge of home mortgages is a long-term losing proposition and a drain on the federal budget.  So must student loans.  And the entire subsidy system that increases the cost of food to line the pockets of large agricultural concerns.  The States can regulate agriculture and screw it up small scale so the Nation is not put at peril by our own government at the large scale.

These are moderate and intermediate transfers and changes that must happen for the Nation to survive and it involves the disentanglement of the US federal government from assumed powers and puts it back on the course of having to do its few duties.  That is a goal, not a destination.

In the very short term, there is the distinct and growing possibility that the current regime in DC will not get re-elected.  They will try, of course, via voter fraud and through compliant Secretaries of State or whichever State level official is in charge of counting the ballots, but if it isn't close, the cheating disappears as a factor.  All is not sweetness and light thereafter, however, although minimal and bare prospects do improve.

There may be a wholesale repudiation of the policies of the last four years (Rep. King from IA, I believe it is, has put a bill like that forward this session and one might expect the same in early JAN 2013).  Even that as a GIVEN the problems of the M&Ms, SSA, and federal intrusion into the loan and banking industry IS STILL THERE.  It is a problem, a major problem, and a structural problem that requires removing, altering or swapping out large parts of the structure set up by the federal government.  The nausea of Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie and their friends at HUD and the Federal Reserve may, finally, put in place something to get these groups disassociated, abolished or made into stock held companies by US citizens and put the federal treasury beyond their reach for good and all.  That is EASY compared to the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over the M&Ms, SSA and 'entitlements', and yet they, too, must be altered, changed and parts of them abolished as well.  Be prepared to put in good people in 2014 to continue the work, and then in 2016 because it won't even have really started by then.  This easy stuff, whacking the weeds out of the way and getting entire departments abolished or turned into temporary block grant accounting groups is easy in comparison.

All of this happens against the slowly building backdrop of One Step Out.

I expect radical Islam to come to power and consolidate and then begin bickering with each other almost endlessly: it is what Caliphates do until they become decadent and collapse.

China has a dustbowl, a demographics collapse, inflation, jobs fleeing to places like Vietnam, a crony banking and industrial system that makes our problems look tiny in comparison... that won't last as it can't go on forever and it can't even go on much longer.  Islam in the far west provinces, Maoism returning just a bit closer and a tiny town able to bring the government to its terms all point to a major set of problems in China.  In a century it may not look anything like modern China in size or scope, although it may be able to keep more coastal ethnic enclaves together.

Japan is at the point of either removing most of its government or disappearing as a people and Nation.  Simple survival choices over the next few years.

India grew fast, economically, but without depth to it and now the faltering steps forward are seeing great problems, internally.

A wheat rust has spread from Africa to the Middle East and now is heading into central Asia which is bad news for all involved.  Russia still has a demographic problem, an Islamic problem, multiple ethnic problems, organized crime as part of the government, and still suffers from lack of infrastructure advancement.

Europe is on the ropes and poverty is about to return there.  Unilever, the large corporation, is now marketing to Greece as it does to places like Indonesia with individual packets of shampoo and a new meal in single serve packs of potato and mayonnaise.  This is where Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France are headed, as well.  Germany is chucking the 'Green' stuff to build 23 new coal fired power plants as it can't depend on foreign sources of energy and solar power just isn't all that dependable.

Gloomy, huh?

The good news?

First, modern medicine is joining the nanotech revolution.  Just like biotech, before it, that means new drugs, new cures, a lower long-term cost, and an extended life span.  Really, if you can lead a healthy and vigorous life up to, say, 100 years old, then why should anyone think about 'retirement' in their 60's?  Or 70's? Or 80's? Or 90's?  Do you see where this is headed?  This is about the demographics of ageing and how it has changed over the 20th century.  Ray Kurzweil pointed this out in the 1990's, I think it was, and that the rate of adding 1 year to life span had been decreasing throughout the 20th century going from nearly 10 years to 4 years at the end of it.  Which is to say that for every 4 years you age, you get an added on average 1 year of life expectancy (not a guarantee by any sort, but it is demographics and averages).  This was an accelerating trend throughout the 20th century starting with good public sanitation, boosted by antibiotics and mass immunization, and then going after some of the harder diseases that were ending lives early.  Nanotech and new approaches to bacteria and viruses, plus the full working of the human genome and its part in chronic diseases now show the promise of eradicating things like cancer, influenza and, possibly, even ageing itself.  When life expectancy goes up 1 year for each 1 year you live, you essentially have a lifespan limited to one where accidents becomes a major killer (not septicemia or heart disease).

To get to there from here requires a hard disentangling of government control over medicine.  Want a brighter, longer lived and healthier, plus lower medical cost future?  Get government out of it.

Want to see M&Ms, SSA and a number of other programs in serious trouble because they are horse and buggy style laws in the equivalent of the jet age, then continue asking the current set of questions and not look towards our future.  If you mortgage that future, now, you are dooming billions to early death, disease, and continued misery.  As I said earlier, surviving the next 20 years generally intact is a major concern.  Prepare.  Now.

- Final Frontier – Forget the oceans, although they will serve as a source of lovely raw materials for stuff on Earth for at least a century.  The next great bonanza is in space, and we aren't talking automated probes, either.  There are now a number of players stepping in to the one policy that Obama has that I can endorse: get the federal government out of providing space transport.  It was meant to HURT the US, yes, but it is, instead, making NASA a mere contract agency to get stuff into space from the private sector.  The current crop of companies are start-ups and now competing to get material, supplies and people to the ISS.  These start-ups are relatively low-key and using relatively old technology that is on a slow trend towards moving the cost per pound to orbit down.  It gets economical at about $1,000/lb. and that is very doable with old technology.  To get the next quantum leap down ($100/lb.) will also require old technology but with new materials to get stuff to the edge of the atmosphere and then go on from there.  At that cost point getting an individual, with space suit, consumables, etc. drops from the cost of a new house to that of a new car.  There is already a consortium of computer age billionaires (the tech boom moguls) who are starting to invest in getting to space in a big way as they see industry being cheaper and easier in space than on Earth.  Pull one good sized asteroid into orbit and you have more gold, platinum, and other precious metals than are currently in the global economy... and it is all accessible.  Lunar material offers the same sort of promise.  Both have the building blocks of industry in silica, iron, copper, tin...

Want to pay off the US debt?  Asteroid in orbit does that in short order.  Be nice if we had a country worth being in that rewarded such stuff, huh?

- Sidelined Cash – To survive the Quantative Easings by the Federal Reserve a lot of investor money has sat out the Obama years.  The last time the Federal Reserve acted like this, it had to jack interest rates up to 20% for a couple of years to get that money out of the system.  Any investor who sees the regulatory lid taken off of the investing and wealth producing class, you know the people who create jobs, will have an opportunity to invest in the recovery.  That can be done directly, through investing in start-ups (space, nanotech, medical) or through the expedient of becoming a private lender without the overhead of public lending institutions.  These are contracts and if making less than the Federal Reserve rate looks half-way decent, it also means getting some of that cash that is headed towards destruction into your pockets for further investment elsewhere.

Tech cash is one place that will be the source of this, as well as a few other places like the energy sector (where a lot of cash will be flowing into it).  An entire energy production, refining and transportation industry for fuels and even electricity will create a boom in the economy.  Some of that will go into other venues (space transport, infrastructure construction) that offer a good amount through doing nothing more than just lending money becoming a bondholder in most cases when its not a direct loan.  A strange time when the Federal Reserve is trying to get money out of the economy and private investors are trying to get it into the economy.

- Rise of the new education paradigm – The current educational system, designed in the 13th century, is about to come to an end.  The Khan Academy, free online content from Universities, and the idea that education goes beyond learning the basics but that you do have to learn the basics, means that our world moves out of the brick and mortar buildings and putting children into holding pens to be lectured, to something that becomes interactive, self-paced and unlimited.  And cheap.  You can't afford an education with the overhead of the old system, but the new system means that you will no longer be tied to a place for your education, but wanting to learn as something you do.  If your lifespan goes on way past 80 and you are still active and fit, then why not?  You will also change careers multiple times or see the idea of a 'career' disappear completely.

This fundamentally alters what we call 'poverty' as only the very least capable of people will be those unable to apply themselves to leading a good life: the permanently infirm, those bereft of mental faculties, and not much else.  Depending on just how long fertility is extended, the idea of 'prime childbearing years' and a 'biological clock' disappear entirely.  If you are getting the idea that simple changes in our understanding of biology, technology and its availability changes our perspective on government and its actual necessity, then you are catching on.  The programs, governmental organizations, taxes and all else that became part of the 'safety net' of the mid-20th century are dependent upon a set of circumstances that are about to be altered in ways that are beyond easy comprehension, but the possibility of you living to see those days are very, very good.

If you survive the next few years.

This is a fight for freedom, liberty and the unleashing of the human capability for the good of oneself and all mankind.  Socialism, that closed border system of limited capability and resources, isn't the future of mankind and the socialistic and progressive ideals are ones that depend on scarcity and rationing for very limited lives.  When your life gets longer, the ideals fall apart as they are 'overtaken by events', or OBE.  That old system that was built on good feelings and feel good because you foisted caring for others onto government is about to be OBE.  The crashing of economies that will happen, the grasp for temporal power is coming straight up against human liberty and freedom where the utilization of your positive liberties will make the last century's stupidity something that we will only scratch our heads about in 50 years.  If you are able to spend any time for that doing your new job in orbit, on the moon or in space, or even just down the hall but teaching about the world and skills necessary on a global and perhaps solar system basis.  Thomas Jefferson thought that the US would expand to the west was, perhaps, something that would be done in hundreds of years, not decades.  Once the pressure valve to get away from asinine and misguided government is opened, just how large will the flood to the future be?

I have no idea.  All you have to do is keep the course, remind everyone including the politicians that your liberty is supreme in your life and that you give very, very few things for government to do and that government is now in the way of the good of yourself and your fellow man.  There is a lot to do in these years, a lot of heartache, a lot of battles, a lot of screaming, and yelling and denial of what is coming because it looks like nothing we have ever seen before.  I welcome that future and the work involved.

Directions of political parties

USA Today is soliciting input on where the Republican Party should go in the future and, really, that is not my place to say.

What I can and do look at is the future of the entire political landscape over the next 20 to 50 years and when looking at that it does not look anything like our current political landscape much of anywhere on the planet.  As the United States has been a leader in many things, the direction that the Nation is starting to move in is one that is beginning to reflect some of the basics of why I started this particular blog: getting back to basics and seeing that the greatest power for the force of good for all mankind is the unchained individual.  To understand how this stuff works the back to basics part is necessary as I laid out in my very first post for this site.

The concept known as Federalism is embodied in the US Constitution and it depends on a moral people who will do the heavy lifting of creating society to do their job at the lowest, most accessible level to them.  That is not the government of the Nation State which is far too gross and coarse a level to deal with local matters.  There is nothing as important as moving away from the idea that a 'social contract' is embodied by any law at the Nation State level and that the 'social contract' is the agreeable form of government that the people have instituted amongst themselves as upheld in spare, even sparse, written form that delimits power to the Nation State and reserves powers to the State (the interior unit of the United States equivalent to provinces in other Nations) and the individual.  Beyond that it is a Do It Yourself concept at play that revolves around republican form of government.

A republican form of government (as opposed to the Republican Party that seems to have forgotten what a republican form of government actually is) is one that divides power internally amongst branches of government and gives them each separate and sovereign domains of power (not rights) that serve the people and act as a check and balance amongst themselves so that no branch dares to over-reach its power domain to swallow up all of government.

Future political parties are wise to mirror this system of federalism with checks and balances internal to their party structure so that no single body ends up being the 'deciding' organization and that the organization, as a whole, is led by its membership, not by party officials.

That is a very stark direction to go that is distinctly different from anything on the political landscape much of anywhere on the planet today.  Yet it is not a radical proposition, at all, as if you acknowledge that federalism is the best way to put power into mutual check with final over-ride by the people of a Nation, then it is a good direction to go for any political party of such a Nation to model itself on that objective, directly.  This is known as 'Do as You Say' and is a part of the concept of Honor:

Do as You Say.

Say what You Mean.

Mean what You Do.

If you espouse 'conservative values' and uphold the Founding era documents and the Founders, then you must back federalism to the hilt and admit that individuals are the greatest moral actors in this life and that Nation States are a mere and shallow reflection of them.  Any system for any form of human activity that vests unchecked power and authority into few hands without immediate and stiff checks and balances, with limitations, is an authoritarian one.  Political parties that become authoritarian, that have governing organizations that create rules to reflect the impetus of those doing the governing is no longer trusting the members of the party for direction and living by an example that admits that power must be recognized first and foremost at the lowest levels of the organization.  That is going Back To Basics and putting Honor into what you espouse.

I've given outline as to how this works in the modern era in Dawn of a New Era and this means that modern ideas must be incorporated into a party so that its membership can better organize at the lowest levels so as to tell the highest levels what to do based on local concerns.  Most of that will be: Mind Your Own Business.

The drivers for the New Era are ones that address the capability of the individual to process information and network with each other so as to shift data to information to knowledge and personal wisdom at an increasing rate of speed over time.  As individuals do this they will remove older power structures between themselves and higher levels, sharing information with their like minded fellows and from that process will emerge a new and slimmed down, less powerful party system.

An end result is one that I outlined within my first ten posts in what such a party will look like (called The Jacksonian Party as there is no other name I could actually put on it at the time).  This is a party concept that doesn't follow President Jackson, but follows what those who put him into office had to deal with on a daily basis and how that social idea became something that spread and prospered in the United States.  This is a cultural phenomena and it leads to end-states driven by multiple factors to reduce the size, scope and power of political parties over time.  A result is a decentralized, disintermediated political structure in which a political party is a mere framework of ideas that helps individuals as candidates to run for office.  A requirement is that the actual party structure, and those helping to govern it, are given very little money and no say in individual candidates at all.

Again, to repeat that: the governing organs of a party are given no say in individual candidates and no money to back 'preferred' ones at all.

Such a political party is run via the agreeable laws and by-laws that members agree to adhere to. Those are created at the most local level and use a federalist form of system to find across-the-board topics suitable to higher power levels of office that do not infringe on the rights and powers of individuals nor upon lower government structural levels.  Inherently federalism recognizes the sovereign power of the people through its compacts to create government and when government is created at any level it is given a separate and sovereign domain within that sovereign power that may be checked and balanced, but cannot be repealed by, other parts of government or other governments at different power scales unless agreed-to by the people.

We call these social contracts Constitutions and within the United States each State has one.  All States agree to the powers granted to the Nation State government as they are the signatories to the US Constitution, and that sign-off is backed by the people of that State as voiced not just via their government but by themselves in the majority.  Similar is done at the State level although States may have different requirements for amending their constitutions so long as it is in a republican form of government.

Adhering to such structures is something that is done by individuals as part of their daily lives, and to that end the political parties they form will reflect that individuals are capable of leading their own lives with minimal outside government interference.  When citizens are trapped by a web of laws, rules and regulations, the object of the rule of law is lost which is a self-ordered society that has citizens holding each other to account for their actions.  Laws are a framework of accountability for actions, not a coercive means to force people into certain behaviors but as a system of punishments against behavior destructive to the social order.

This does not create the modern socialist/progressive concept of 'the personal is the political' but leads to an understanding that politics is driven by individuals and is reflective of them, and that such politics as are necessary are just that: necessary and not a force for good.  Positive morality is created by individuals and political parties must respect that and must not seek to foster the use of negative powers to that end.  Punishment is punishment, it is not the moral and social good in and of itself and only through the use of the positive powers of individuals is that positive moral life created.  Removing negative actors from society for punishment is the necessary function of that organ of society we call government and it is not the brain, as organs go, but the more process oriented ones that remove unwanted or dangerous items from the body for the overall health of the body of society.  The idea of making the personal into the political creates a cancer within the organs of government as it seeks to cater to each and every individual want, not address the needs of the body, and soon those organs are crowding out the functioning of the body of society and killing it.

As all of these things are based on self-evident truths, that all men are created equal and endowed with their Creator with certain unalienable rights and amongst these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.  Indeed all rights and powers start with the individual and none accrue to higher orders of government that are not already within individuals.  There is no power or right that accrues to any government of any society and that society is, itself, created when individuals agree within themselves to forebear the use of negative powers and rights to save protect their families, their homes and their very selves.  Society must reflect this self-governance, abide by it and recognize that self-government is the highest of all forms of government invented amongst men as it is the most powerful as it uses the power of restraint to create good amongst men.

In less than a century (indeed, perhaps less than two decades) it is this power, unleashed by the distributive forces of knowledge amongst men that will reshape the political and social structure not just of the United States but of the world and all mankind.  As we step into an era where the power of the individual to self-govern becomes paramount, this puts the positive liberties of man to create a moral and just society with limited government as an end product of this recognition, not a goal or end-state by any means.  Our politics will remain as divided as ever amongst Nations as all Nations have the sovereign right of their people to have a free and independent society that has, amongst the powers of the Earth, the ability to create government to suit them.  These things that are representative of such differences we call Nations and they start not at the Nation State level but at the level of family, home and hearth.

Any political party seeking to create a power over all men that isn't God but mere government is seeking an Empire and tyranny.

And their day is drawing to a close as the Dawn of a New Era begins.

My advice to the Republican Party, indeed all political parties: get with the program or your days are numbered.

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.

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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.