The fictional citizen

What a strange title for a blog post, no?  What is a fictional citizen?  Why do they exist?  And are they better or worse than being a real citizen?

So many concepts that go with fiction, aren't there?  But there are very real fictional citizens and, no, they aren't hiding in shadows or scurrying across borders or any of that sort of thing.  These are ones that have been known for ages, and tend to be despised by the modern Left for the 'power' they wield.  Ah, the criticisms: that a carte blanche is given to these fictional citizens and that they run roughshod over everyone!  Day in and day out I hear the complaints of the Left about these fictional citizens and yet, for all the moaning, griping and complaining, no one ever bothers to find out exactly what the actual, real problem is with them and how they might be dealt with.  So, as a person used to reading fiction and even trying my hand at some derivative fiction, plus running role playing universes in which I get to run the rest of the universe while players play at being people in such universes, I will give that a shot.

In this instance the fictional citizen is made by law and is thusly a legal fiction.

We call these legal fictions by a few names: companies and corporations.

Hitting on the word corporation it hints at how we get the 'citizen' part attached to these legal functions.  You are a corporeal citizen, that is an independent individual that has flesh and blood attached to you.  However one of the words we use when individuals die is to 'discorporate', that is you are no longer attached to your corporeal form any longer.  You are not incorporated into it, in other words.

When a legal fiction is incorporated, that is all the necessary legal papers are drafted to create the corporation, it then becomes a 'corporate citizen', a concept I am quite sure most have heard of at some point in their lives.  Now these fictional citizens have somewhat different constraints on them being merely legal incorporations and not individuals incorporated with a body, which is corporeal existence.  Legal fictions can hold property, then can hold funds and goods, they can be owned by one or millions of people, they get their own special tax code, they get all sorts of things we don't leverage upon real citizens because they are fictional constructs that we create to do business.

There are things they can't do, in general, like get up and walk around.  Their headquarters may move, yes, but that is done via a different process than you, as an individual, getting up from your chair and walking around.  Corporations may process air through air handlers for their offices, but they cannot breathe.  Only by allowance from Congress can they keep and bear arms in combat, although they can make armaments that is only for sale not for corporate use.  Corporations cannot vote in elections, another area of difference between you, as an individual, and a corporation as a fictional entity.  While they may exchange funds or goods with another company and found a new company, that is not the same as having sex and giving birth to a child, which is biological in its origin, not created by forms filled out and slips of paper passed around to be signed and counter-signed.

Some similarities are striking, however, in the way we see corporate citizens.  They have the right to freedom of speech, which the Left moans about greatly, but they are also beholden to the same limits on speech for slander and libel.  They have freedom of worship, as there are religious based incorporated entities often associated with charities.  They can petition government, which is another problem the Left has with corporations, that and their ability to contribute to political campaigns.  A search warrant is required to search a corporations' properties, and they are protected from unlawful search and seizure of their property and goods.

Then there are the ways that these incorporated citizens are actually superior to corporeal citizens.  They have no life expectancy, and can (in theory) live forever.  As they exist as incorporated entities, they can change their place of corporation and gain corporate citizen rights in other countries without being seen as having a dual allegiance problem.  Individual corporations can gain much power and money, over time, and generally wield influence when petitioning a government beyond the ability of a normal citizen to do, which is the nub of the grief from the Left on this topic, I believe.  And they can be scofflaws and still exist, which is a major bonus for a company that makes enough profit to shrug off fines and lose individuals who do wrong for the company's benefit.

The major problems and grief that associate the Left on their problems with corporations tends to be the power accumulation bit, along with the making money from wrong-doing part.

Do they ever address these problems?

No.

Not a hint of how to solve the problems, just complaints.  Lots of complaints.

To help out the faint of heart I will suggest a couple of things to 'reform' our concept of legal fictions while still keeping them as a viable option.

As almost everything the Left complains about revolves around power and undo influence of corporations, the question must be asked: how do they get so much of them?

The answer is astonishing: they can exist forever and remain free even after wrong is done for them by individuals.

Can these be addressed without losing the concept of the 'corporation' as a viable social tool?

Yes, they can.

First is a 'Three Strikes and You're Out' law.  We do this for repeat offenders that are actual people, so why not apply it to corporate citizens as well?  Any company that accumulates three felonies (federal, State and they are cumulative) then gets immediately discorporated so as to never reform again.  It gets broken down and sold piecemeal at auction, its intellectual property is put in the public domain, its records are kept by the State for review, and the company vanishes from the marketplace.  After its debt is paid off then the remains are divided amongst the shareholders as cash. It doesn't matter if its a local mom and pop store that was dealing drugs on the side or some huge behemoth.  Transnational companies will find that after they have lost their corporate holding in America, they can't get back into the country as a company: their overseas goods can still be sold here, but they cannot return from the dead.  And as the 'Strikes' penalty accrue to the parent company, that means any organization that they have any role in operating would be barred from starting up in the US, and the requirement for third parties that are separate entities would be the only way for such companies to sell their goods and services in the US market.  Americans could still purchase from overseas suppliers, of course, and take on that third party role for themselves as citizens, not corporations.

Yes a corporate death penalty, simple, isn't it?  Now lets extend this concept one more step.

Second is a life expectancy for a corporation set by law.  Between your entering majority and leaving this life is in the neighborhood of 60 years, of which a good part of that is spent accumulating the necessary goods and wealth to have a good life, perhaps raise a family, and generally ensure your continued existence via your use of liberty and freedom.  Thus the prime time of your life is about 40 to 50 years long.  Why should a corporation last longer than that?  If you want to pass some goods and cash to your children you can have a corporations made at your death to do so, and they get that as a great start to their lives!  Isn't 40-50 years long enough to actually do something with a company?  And wouldn't it be a benefit to the marketplace to have no long-term giants standing around, but to have them finally die off after a given period of time?  The time span must be one that is set in a way so as to make it something that the average physical citizen can understand as a concept: forever doesn't seem right due to the accumulation of wealth and power of such entities, but 20 years is way too short.  By setting a definite expiration date for a company much good can be done for markets and society, while allowing corporations to do what they were made to do, achieve that and then end with that achievement as something that can be pointed to and understood... without the company still hanging around.

Like your death the company does get to give away its assets after its debt is paid off.  Those are the physical assets, only, and intellectual property goes into the public domain.  Intellectual works originated in a company and held by a company only last as long as the company does, even if sold or traded away, they go the way of their originator.  This will, finally, get rid of companies lobbying to have copyright extended past a person's death which one or two powerful companies with great influence on this topic have done to distort the original intent of 'limited time' for materials under copyright.

Together these two concepts start to 'level the playing field' of competition in the marketplace as incumbent corporations in a field have a definite life span so that the worries about a monopoly are addressed and anti-trust law can be taken off the books as by the time a company gets enough sway in a market to try and act as a monopoly, it is also tending to be past the early part of its life and has a ticking clock against it.  Those seeking the benefit of creative destruction in the marketplace to churn it, now will have a maximum beat of that churn: the life of a given company.

Enacting the second would require giving a period of time to existing companies: say the half-life of the new life expectancy or the life expectancy minus the amount of time they have been around, whichever is greater.

The Three Strikes law would be a clean slate, but be enforced immediately upon its becoming law, so that any ongoing cases will count against corporation, while past ones would not.

Thirdly is in the area of speech, particularly political speech.  We, for some reason, see fit to limit donations from corporeal citizens.  The concept is to apply those limitations to incorporated citizens, exactly as they are to actual citizens, save that it would apply to all parts and segments of a company.  In principle there should be no reason to see the speech rights of a company as different from that of an individual in any venue.

These three concepts dealing with corporation life span and speech would do much to address the abuses of companies over the long-term.  Bad corporate actors like Enron will still be made, that is a part of the human condition, nothing can change that save better accounting requirements for public disclosure.  These are the main three that would address the problems of the Left and bring corporations to be something that we don't expect to be around as continued beings.  Remember, you can still have one made on your death date to help your children along for a period of time, but at some point that, too, will go away.

By these changes a major shock would be given to the US economy: businesses that are huge (Boeing, Ford, Fannie, Freddie, the Federal Reserve, IBM, GM, GE) would have expiration dates coming around in a couple of decades.  Things we don't think of as corporations, but are legal fictions as entities would also face this: private libraries, hospitals, private universities, charitable organizations, political parties, advocacy groups, PACs.  What this means is a major re-thinking of how we run our society and addressing our own temporary existence by first having to deal with the expiration of companies.  Within two decades major institutions, good and bad, would evaporate off the landscape leaving vast market areas open for new entrants. 

The requirement to discorporate fully, pay off debts and give any remains to shareholders or those that own the company, means that those institutions have to be re-made, re-purposed, re-designed, re-configured and, generally, require people to ask if they really WANT a replacement for it or can get support to make a new version of it.  I am sure that some long-lasting niches would find themselves barren of incorporated individuals as they have actually served their purpose and it isn't worth trying to re-make them.  Others, like the entire venue of education, would be re-made by totally new start-ups willing to compete on the playing field of providing value for the money in the way of a good education.  Banking would have a huge turn-over, and the financial system of the US would break down... not in the 'collapse' sense, but in the 'break down into smaller, more agile pieces' sense.  With the end of large banking institutions and other financial institutions, there would be major upheaval in those markets, yet where needs are vital there would be new entrants ready to step into and step up to the challenge.

Political parties would find that they had to re-start afresh, that old parties used to doing things one way would be gone from the landscape and new successors would be formed by the people to take their place.  Gone would be the certainty of Red and Blue, Left and Right, This or That: the two-party system exists solely due to the incumbent parties able to keep new entrants out, thus politics has stagnated in America and power has concentrated into the hands of the few and that has depressed electorate turnout to 50% or less in the Congressional election cycles.  In a couple of decades there would be no Republicans, no Democrats, no Socialists, no Communists, no Greens, and even the smaller parties that have been around for decades would soon find a death date approaching.  I am sure that some would try to continue on the parties under a different name, but they would have to be totally re-situated, get people to enroll in them, get support, find candidates... and compete at the local level with anyone else trying to start a party.

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The above are ways to creatively address problems and offer solutions that do not 'break' the capitalist system nor make it into a crony system of preferred companies getting rewards while those that are not preferred getting penalized by government.  Are they good methods to employ?  I cannot say for certain, but they certainly are much further along in addressing 'problems' in the political landscape and should wipe the very reason for those problems to exist right off the map while retaining all the good features of the capitalist system and penalizing the bad actors immediately and removing the accumulation of wealth and power via a regularized form of known and understood methods that will cause churn in the marketplace without being upsetting to the market as a whole.

Attempts to tinker capitalism into 'playing nice' has meant high government overhead in the form of regulations, and those very regulations tend to be in favor of large corporations able to lobby government over a number of legislators and legislative sessions.  Smaller companies have a major problem with regulations that impose pre-conditions at size levels as being anti-small business and a barrier to entry to becoming larger.  This is not only a penalty but a non-market based pressure imposed upon the marketplace so as to reward larger entities over small ones by securing the larger entities from competition.  Soon they become 'too big to fail', and yet they do fail due to size and lack of competition to cause innovation in such large organizations.  By placing a known, exact life span on all companies, big and small, the carpet protecting big companies is pulled out from under them and all new entrants to becoming large must face up with the barriers erected to protect large companies, thus leveling that playing field for all players as the cost of becoming large is a set, known quantity.

The 'Three Strikes' system is perhaps the easiest of all parts of this to do as it is something that is known and understood by all of us: recidivists need a major penalty applied to them, and since these are not flesh and blood entities the ultimate price can be paid more easily to stop these actors from ever acting again.  A company with a single 'Strike' against it finds that their ability to expand is only slightly hampered as expansion requires a trained workforce able to uphold corporate ethics with regards to the law.  Yet a company can continue on past that in a relatively easy fashion, although parts that it attempts to shed have the 'Strike' attached to them, also.  There is no way to cleanse an organization of that save via discorporation and breakdown: death is the final end for such problems.  So selling off portions of a company as subsidiaries means that those parts have a separate load of burden upon them.  Remember if this is done without a final expiration date, then that portion could continue on forever with that single 'Strike'.  A company purchasing it, however, is faced with the moral dilemma of having to purchase that company and either keep it wholly separate, or accept its 'Strike' by fully incorporating it during any reorganization that dissolves the company into the larger structure.  This would be a new category of business ethics and how to deal with bad actors in the marketplace, and yet it would only be a major hamper on a business that already has two 'Strikes' against it as they could never reorganize the smaller unit into the larger one.

While this sort of system may seem to advantage the adversaries of companies, that is activist groups pushing lawsuits, it must be remembered that those organizations, themselves, fall into the same category of law for the 'Three Strikes' provisions and that 'targeted' companies can run themselves in an ethical and law abiding fashion and escape a 'Strike' by turning in bad actors before they are found by outsiders and reimbursing those that have suffered due to the actions of that individual from the corporation.  Self-policing and turning oneself in to authorities with an admitted misdeed has always gotten lower penalties as the individual involved recognized their culpability and is seeking to make amends and restitution to society and to those they harmed by the action of turning themselves in.  That behavior MUST be rewarded by lowering penalties and seeing that the company does not and will not allow itself to benefit by the actions of the few bad actors within it.  Corporate ethics go from being a joke and 'its all about money' to not only a worthwhile pursuit but something that companies will seek to enforce in a meaningful way by turning such bad actors in when they are found.  An outside organization cannot inflict harm where a company polices its own actions well enough to find bad actors before 'activists' or law enforcement.  This is what is known as being a 'Good Corporate Citizen'.

In some ways the first two concepts can be seen as an either/or situation, as they both begin to address bad corporate actors with the ultimate end to corporations: the first against the bad actors and rewarding those that act in an ethical manner by lowering penalties to the company (not the individual) and the second by putting a life span on all companies.  If both were put in play there might be some trend to companies willing to do wrong as they don't expect to be around that long.  We already have that problem as we can see the Enrons and Madoff's of the world are more than willing to throw ethics overboard in search of pure gain.  Nothing can be done to stop such actors in life, save to penalize them harshly.  That is part and parcel of being human and no set of laws made on this Earth can address them from doing such things, only set into place a system that discovers them, faster. 

Companies nearing the end of their natural life might be inclined to behave in an irresponsible fashion as they don't have much time left.  Yet for their corporate history they have avoided 'Three Strikes' in total and will either have a good set of corporate ethics (to be admired and upheld to all corporations as 'how to do it') or they will be in the precarious position of one or two 'Strikes' bringing their sudden demise.  If the ethics of a company go so rapidly downhill so as to cause those, then they will be unlikely to remain around for long as their ethics suck to begin with and they won't be around long enough to lose all touch with their founder's ethics, as that founder just might still be around to run the show or criticize it from the outside if he or she has sold it off.  That would be a major warning sign and red flag in the business community that the corporation is losing touch with its initial purpose and should be scrutinized.

In many ways these are self-reinforcing laws that put upon companies the same requirements as individuals have in corporeal life: people who lead good lives don't tend to go bad when they get older and set in their ways, and those with bad intents tend to run into problems sooner rather than later.  There will always be people like Bernie Madoff, and only good corporate accounting standards can help to show Ponzi Schemes up for what they are, there is nothing to stop those who wish to 'cook books' from doing so.  What can be done is to make the penalties steep, very steep, for such actions and the effects of them cumulative.

The final part, of speech, is one that helps to extend our ideas of exactly what being a 'citizen' is all about in the way of exercising our liberties and freedom.  If the 'threat' to society, as the Left would have it, is from corporations being big and overwhelming with speech and money, then the problem is not with the speech or the money, but the means to accumulate same.  Money is not speech: it costs nothing to go out on the sidewalk and rant.  Similarly it costs very little for a company to hawk its wares on the sidewalk with a bullhorn or to get a name space on the Internet to set up shop: your overhead is minimal for such, too, so that is a level playing field with minor barriers to entry.  Money spent to get a message out doesn't help if the message is muted on television, the ads blocked by software, or just 'tuned out' by the recipient audience. 

Newspapers make money not through subscriptions, but through circulation of advertisements, and a few new entrants to newspaper markets that are not subscription based are becoming major competitors by having circulation of news to entice people to pick up the papers on their way to work.  If you don't pick up the paper, you don't help the company, if you do pick it up you help them: the choice is up to you if you want to get an advertising vehicle at your own cost or for free.  Free does not guarantee that people will actually read the ads, just that they will be in a media in the hands of individuals in which it might be presented before them.  Money doesn't get you access, and even if it does get widespread distribution, that doesn't mean that people will actually pay attention to it or LIKE the message.  No one is forcing individuals to GET THE MESSAGE no matter HOW MUCH you pay to distribute it.  Money is not speech, nor speech money, although some after-dinner speakers can command a hefty sum, needless to say, but they are effective speakers which is a both a gift and a job that one can study for.

At the end of this I find the parallels between how we treat legal fictions as citizens and real citizens to be an interesting one.  If the concept is extended to something like 'income' then could we replace all corporate taxes with a single, flat income tax?  The question of 'what is income?' then moves from an academic question to a real world one.  Is it just being paid by an employer?  If so then it is not a 'sales tax', and would be leveraged on any contracts that have set payment amounts on a regular basis to a company to provide a good or service: the company is working for someone, it is being employed by them. 

Thus not all contracts would be 'employer-employee' basis as something like a contract to provide an indefinite quantity of an item over time could not guarantee that any would be purchased, therefore the risk is on the 'employee' not the 'employer'.  Goods made for sale with no pre-existing contract are then not made for anyone specific but made for society, in general, and available for individuals to buy.  That is certainly not an employer-employee relationship.  Nor are items that do not meet up to a contract set of standards for sale, but are generally safe, useful and functional for general sale.  A contract to supply security services at a home or business would be an such a relationship between employer (those procuring the long-term services) and the employee (those supplying such services).  Hiring someone to do something on other than the purely short-term (less than a week, say) creates that relationship necessary to define 'income'.   From that sales of items are not, of necessity, employee-employer relationships, and most fit into the indefinite quantity, indefinite delivery type of contract where the amounts and timing can only be generally defined and, therefore, revenues are not a guaranteed constant.  Employing a roofer for a few days isn't a long-term contract, employing people to keep your lawn up over a year is.  Temps while 'employed' are only temporary or go through a third party for a longer-term relationship, so the direct actor is the Temp Agency, not the one needing the services.

So if we look to extend an 'income tax' idea it would have some ramifications on how we do business with businesses, as service contracts to the home (for cable TV, telephone, Internet, power, lighting, water, sewage, etc.) ARE long term contract types of this sort.  You are employing an entity (private or public) to provide long term services in a very real sense.  You are the boss.  That might make your take on why a public utility should have a monopoly change, greatly, as such things as education for children are ALSO employee-employer relationships especially when specific and identifiable taxes for same based on school districts or other direct tax funding are utilized.  Government acts as the intermediary, but the service is a monopoly one and you, as the boss, should have some say on if you want a monopoly service, or not... that is done via this thing known as 'elections' to change 'laws'.  But once you see yourself as the employer (and have the headaches of employing someone befall you) then you begin to take a different look on exactly what 'income' is and how it is garnered, and what overhead we place upon it in regards to the viability of such work.

The concept of creating more 'real' citizens and accountability has limits when dealing with fictional entities.  The lack of actual questioning of what those limits are and what they mean to us, as individuals, shakes up how we view ourselves, how we utilize our liberty as individuals and with other individuals to form fictional entities, and what the actual driving ideas behind such concepts are.  While the original complaints from the Left are those of the Harpy, the underlying concepts are vital ones that we take for granted and, by doing so, lose sight of what it is we do in life and why we structure certain things the way we do as individuals and a society.

On the Duties of Man - To Man

This post is a continuation of the examination of Samuel Pufendorf's On the Duty of Man and Citizen (1682).  This post follows the previous section I've looked at On the Duties of Man - To God plus the overview of why this is important in Three Realms of Law.  This work by Pufendorf is, itself, an overview of a multi-volume work he had generated and thought that a primer on that work, suitable for students, would be a vital part of a teaching curricula examining Natural Law.  I will continue to do the overview of his logic and keep my usual commentary in abeyance as much as possible so as to follow Pufendorf's line of reasoning so that the outline of it is plain to see.

In the post-Westphalia tradition of Europe (and America) the concept of the 'Separation of Church and State' is one that is done for the benefit of the Church which had become a key part in State power.  The 30 Years War revolved around the question of which religion was to hold sway over Europe and the Nobles and States of that era followed differing religious beliefs and then imposed those on the people of their holdings or States.  When a realm went from Roman Catholic to Protestant, there would follow the forced change in religious outlook from the top - down.  This would include grabbing the material wealth of the religious doctrine that was in disfavor and the persecution, and often execution, of those who would not convert over to the State's new religious outlook.  With 15% of Europe dead by the end of the conflict, the Great Peace of Westphalia would impose restrictions, agreed to by treaty, upon all those taking part in the Treaty.  While the Roman Catholic Church via the Vatican did not take official part in the Treaty, Roman Catholics could and did help the formulation of it.  This treaty would break apart the links of State and Church so that States could not repress or suppress any of the three forms of Christianity then extant in Europe: Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Calvinism.

During that conflict two major writers put forward their different conceptions of how they saw the work of Nation States and religion: Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius.  Samuel Pufendorf examined their works (and many others, needless to say) and would then be the first writer in the post-Westphalian world to blend the outlooks of both Hobbes and Grotius while taking into account the Treaty which would forever change the course of Europe.  Many of the ideas formulated by Pufendorf have resonance with prior works in the Greek and Latin world, and also with those in the Anglo-Saxon tradition like Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England. From the philosophical basis of reasoned examination dating back to Plato and Socrates, then putting in the Latin and Church traditions plus those of the Protestants, and blending in examinations of laws, states and religion, Samuel Pufendorf would be one of the first to present what we would call a 'liberal' view of the world by positing that God is not enough, nor is having a State and that there is a third realm which is Creation in which we must all exist that is separate from both God's moral law and the law we create via the State.  This is Natural Law which is ever present in our mortal life, restricts us in our views, and otherwise shows the physical instantiation of God's Will.  Being part of that Creation we must take it into account as it speaks of God's Will in a way that is not contained by Scripture nor can it be dictated to by the State.  When we examine our Duties as Man and Citizen we cannot leave out this thing called Natural Law as it is a vital part of what allows us to have States so as to be Citizens.

With that, I now proceed on to our Duties to Man.

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The duty of Man to oneself starts with the very simple and self-evident truth that self-love is something that we are born with.  We use our natural gifts and talents from the Creator to our own good and self-interest, thusly we care about ourselves and love ourselves to do those necessary things.  If we did not have that self-love we would assuredly perish.  There is no need to impress obligation of self-love from any other venue: you have it as a given at birth.

From the Creator also comes the self-evident truth that you do not wish your natural gifts to perish and that they must be used so as to contribute to human Society so as to seek the preservation of such gifts over time.  Having such gifts and not recognizing that you have them is your shame and loss, but when taught that you have them those doing the teaching are right to punish the pupil for not recognizing their own gifts and utilizing them  It is one thing to neglect one's gifts through ignorance, another to purposely ignore them when those willing to show the vital use of them are at hand.

We do this because we, as individuals, have two parts to us - the soul [anima] which drives and controls the physical body via the intermediary of the mind [animus] which is our direct government of our body.  It is the mind which must encompass Society, not only look after the needs of the body, and it is to that part of us that our ability to become a contributing and vital part of society is held.  Our soul directs, the mind then does the work of following those orders as best as possible within the realm of what can be done via the body.  All morals and ethics are decided upon by the mind, in accordance with the soul so as to give the body the greatest chance to survive and prosper.  With that said our physical needs cannot dictate to us as that then creates gluttony, sloth and the creation of passions not directed clearly towards our self-betterment and may actually be contrary to it and our contact with Society.  A strong spirit resists such temptations so as to become a better man, and those who give into them become less of themselves as they do not recognize the true direction of their self-evident obligations to themselves and Society.

Your life is given from the Creator and you are set for your time in life until the Creator requires you to leave it.  A man can choose a course in life that will shorten it, in doing hard labors and constantly tiring himself to the benefit of himself and Society a shorter life may ensue.  A citizen may willingly risk his life for others, so long as there is benefit to that and is not just adding to a general slaughter to no good ends.  With your life in your hands you must weigh and balance those times when sacrifice, even the ultimate sacrifice, on your part is of benefit to your Society which is the holder of those things which you have given to it in the way of yourself.  There is no obligation for such sacrifice, no words saying that you must give up your life for your fellow man, no one can decide that for you: only you can do that for yourself.

To throw away one's life is a violation of Natural Law in all instances.  It does not matter if it be due to personal misfortune, pain and suffering, throwing oneself into a lost battle to die or putting forward an empty show of faith, they are all the same.  No one profits from your death and Society mourns the loss of skills and fortitude necessary to continue on your life for its allotted time on Earth.  We can learn fortitude and strength from the suffering of others, that it is possible to confront such pain and anguish and survive and even come out the other side of it a better man.  For those with illnesses that will have no end, their example to us of how to live with such things is far, far more important than taking the easy way out for if they can suffer and cling to life until its bitter end, then that demonstrates the power of that life and our own life can benefit from that so as to steel ourselves for lesser travails than theirs.  As horrific as suffering is, and it wouldn't be suffering if it wasn't horrific, it does have a larger context in life and as a demonstration to others of the value of such life within the context of Society.  The greatest gift of the suffering isn't to die, but to live and show us how to lead with perseverance through all lesser times in our own lives.

From this, when the acts of another man put our lives in danger we have the obligation and natural right of self-defense to put ourselves out of danger while seeking to do as little harm to those who attack us as possible.  Self-defense when another takes a risky course of action to attack us or threaten us then invokes our duty, obligation and right to life, and there is no misdeed in carrying through with such self-defense.

Exercising self-defense has the negative effect of injury or death upon your attacker, yourself or both, and this cannot be denied.  While all life is to be cherished and protected, the concept of reciprocity of civility is a requirement for social discourse.  That is that a peaceful and friendly manner is to be reciprocated between people so as to have a civil environment.  As your safety as an individual is part of that sociality, there is no law that prevents one from defending himself from harm.  When one seeks to do harm to another or harm is being perpetrated upon you, the right to self-defense becomes a bulwark of civil discourse by upholding civil standards.  To not do so is to put at peril the good things provided by nature or industry and leave them open to despoliation.  Any attempt to remove the means of self-protection of individuals would be the death of the human race.

With those things said it must always be sought to mitigate the use of force via defensive action, by securing oneself so that an attacker's fury will have had a chance to wane.  Along with this is the prudence of not taking umbrage to minor slights so as to cause them to escalate into provocation and this is to be done if at all possible.

Defense of self includes defense of one's property as any who would violate one's property have already demonstrated no restraint on their actions.  To those ends defense of your property with violent means is allowable in the natural state and in the civil state for immediate purposes.  It is also allowable to chase those who have violated your property in the immediate extent.  In the natural setting you can do so until you have tracked down the individual, while in the civil setting this requires the recourse of the Magistrate and seeking the civil means of law to track such people down.  In the natural setting you can find change of heart and repentance from the individual who has done harm to your property, and you may accept that.  In the civil instance this is for the process of law to decide guilt or innocence.  In either instance it is mandatory to take away the tools available to such individuals to do harm again: that is either on the civil or natural state, it is mandatory that those who are judged guilty or who have repented of their ways have the tools of their ways removed from them.

The right of self-defense is against both those things done by malice and those done by error, thusly there is no right to kill another and submit to being killed due to error.  If you are mistaken for another and harm comes your way, your right to defend yourself is paramount, no matter the cause of the infliction of harm.

To defend oneself from harm by putting up innocent safeguards that will protect you from harm is part of your natural duties towards yourself against your fellow man.  Arming oneself, forming alliances, erecting fences and walls to protect yourself are all parts of what nature bids us to do in our self-defense and there is no wrong in doing them.  These works cannot be used to justify attacking another to conquer them and despoil their goods by force.  This is true no matter how powerful a neighbor is.

Upon seeing that a third party intends harm against another, your first duty is to yourself, save if you have treaty with another to protect him.  Again this is man in the natural state, not the Nation State with civil government and law that is being talked about.  Still, a powerful third party that seeks to conquer or subdue a neighbor can rightly be suspected of wishing to cause you harm after subduing your neighbor.  When you see that plans are laid for violence against you by a third party, you have the right of self-defense by force and seizing the initiative before such plans come to fruition so long as there is no hope of friendly warning dissuading him from such plans.  Defense is not merely avoiding blows, avoiding harm, nor evading your capture as the right of attack in your own defense before being attacked when the plans against you are clear then allows you to stop such plans by force.

In our civil states it is not allowable to attack a government when it is planning to do harm to a third party that plans harm against a fellow citizen.  It is always to be sought to bring such potential assailant before a common Magistrate so as to have his plans addressed in common.  You are not allowed the pre-emptive attack against a third party as a citizen in the civil state, and only once attacked is your right of self-defense to be called upon.  When such violence is visited upon one in the civil state it is your self-defense that allows you to take any measures, up to killing another, to protect yourself.  When such threat is neutralized by being driven off, by the death of the assailant or by you finding safe haven, you are not to continue the engagement but to get the office of civil government involved so as to address the matter.

There is no obligation to always seek the milder form of self-defense as, when one is attacked, the mental turmoil that ensues will change the evaluations of what is, exactly, to be done.  One might leave a place of safety to confront an attacker, one might not run when they are in open sight of an aggressor as to turn and flee is to invite falling or being attacked in the back.  Thus, even if there is relative safety with neighbors nearby, the mental state may not allow that to be an option.  One may also appear in public when they know that they are at risk of attack, the right of self-defense still holds in that case as well.  In the case of duels, however, there is no safe haven to self-defense as it is a purposeful event chosen by the individuals involved, thus the innocence of self-defense cannot be brought into play.

In defense of his limbs a man is allowed the same as in defending his life.

In addition female virtue is also guaranteed the same capability as self-defense.  No greater offense against a woman can be imagined than to take her against her will and force her to raise the child of her own blood for an enemy.

As property is a necessary part of living, those who attack our property are attacking our life in a very real sense.  We cannot preserve our life without our worldly goods, and those seeking to deprive you of them are attacking your life.  In the state of nature we can repel and hunt down such people, while in the civil state we appeal to the civil government for help of recovery but retain the right of self-defense against burglars and robbers of all sorts.

To move on from self-defense are those who have attacked others.  They are barred from self-defense until critical conditions are first met.  He must be repent of the harm he has caused others and give guarantee that he shall do no future harm to others.  That being offered such repentance if he shows savagery in his heart by refusing such and obtaining vengeance at his own hand.

Self-preservation is so high a natural duty that is seen as exempt from the common laws. 'Necessity knows no laws'.  There is no power, no authority, not God nor civil government that can impose an edict so strict upon us as to compel us to face death for them.  Because of this we give exception to laws that have put individuals in danger by following them and recognize that there is no compelling reason for a man to follow a law, no matter how well intentioned, that forces him not to obey self-preservation.

As examples a man may sacrifice an infected limb to save his life.

-On a lifeboat we draw lots if there is not enough food to go around, and those that will not abide by this are tossed overboard instead of letting common fate decide the ends of each.

-If thrown into a hole with deep water and you can swim and the other cannot, and he clings to you and drags you down, then you are within the right of self-defense to release yourself from his grasp.

-If shipwrecked and you find a plank or means to save yourself, but not another, and proceed to do so, and the other swims out to you threatening your survival, you may repel him.

-If an enemy chases two with intent to kill both and the only means of escape requires destroying the means to get to you, even if that means the other is killed, then you are to do so as your life would be forfeit otherwise.

It is also permissible by necessity to cause injury to another to escape death.  If pursued by a stronger man intent on harming you, and you flee down a confined alleyway and another person, innocent of the conflict, blocks the way, you are allowed to knock them down if they do not take the warning of your action or words as proof of your necessity.  You may very well cause harm to this person, but necessity allows such to save your own.  If that person blocking your way was an innocent or cripple, then at least the pursuer would  have the necessity of jumping over them and exposing himself, briefly, to the pursued.  And if the blocker is doing so wilfully, then he may be knocked down and flattened directly as they have courted their own disaster.

The poorest beggar, who has nothing left to sell, cannot sell his works or be hired, who gets no recompense from begging nor friends to succor him may seek to gain sustenance from those who have an overabundance without committing the crime of robbery, so long as there is intent to pay back such sustenance to those it is taken from.  From that it follows that the wealthy are by the limits of humanity, to help the poor and destitute as they are his fellow man.  Still a man is to try all other ways so as to sustain himself then falls under not only necessity but the perfection of obligation of doing no harm.  It can only be done to those not liable to fall into similar dire straits due to that loss and the obligation to make amends via full restitution is perfect and must be done.  If they cannot make a free gift of aid due to their circumstances, then your obligation is not to put them into the same peril you are now in.

Finally the necessity of destroying the property of others to save our own may only be done if there is no way to save the other's property and its value, to the other, is less than the value of your property to you.  In attempting to move or otherwise find means to save the property of another due to the imminent destruction of your own, when that loss is made you are to seek to give restitution to the one who has lost property.  If both properties are at risk and sacrificing some of another's will save yours from perishing, then the loss you are to make up is pro rata as you have saved both from ultimate harm by doing injury to another's property.  That is the basis of maritime law, and it serves on land as well as at sea for such events.

* * *

As with the previous section, I will not be commenting upon this section, save to say that the basis of what we understand our obligation to ourselves to be from natural law, and then under civil law, is something that is obvious and cannot be denied.  This is not due to the nature of civil society, but due to the nature of man, and as man is a being of Natural Law, and always will be no matter where we are in this mortal realm we are within the mortal realm and thus not transcendent of it.

After this comes the duty of every man to every man.

Demographics are destiny

There is a problem with the 'entitlement' programs that go beyond the loss of liberty by exchanging what should be a citizen's concern, that is caring for the elderly, sick and poor, for a government program.  That is bad enough, to put your personal citizen's responsibility into the hands of government and expect one of the least efficient actors in any Nation (that is government) to provide the care of the most efficient (that is charity).  Even beyond the degrading aspects of pushing those who are old or ill into the welcoming hands of red tape bearing bureaucrats is something even more fundamental that has been a problem with these programs for decades.

The problem?

Demographics.

When I speak of demographics, I go beyond just the easy to identify 'Baby Boom' generation that is a budget buster in all regards to 'entitlements'.  That is simple calculation to see how many will survive to get those 'entitlements' and then look at the workforce to support them.  As bad as this generations long Ponzi Scheme is, and it is horrific beyond all counts, it is based on a concept of a set age for receiving benefits.  That age has now been adjusted for SSA once, and the proposal by Rep. Paul Ryan and others would seek to move it even higher.  And yet that flies in the face of demographics.  Which part of demographics, in particular?  Life Expectancy.

In a previous review of this topic in Insurance, assurance and prosperity, I examined the underlying demographic trends of the 20th century prior to SSA and then past its enactment.  When looking at the capability of SSA or other entitlements to be 'sustainable' it must be acknowledged that there is an active worker to recipient ratio that changes due to the number of people in each category.  Life expectancy, if it remains stable, then allows for a determination of the average age of death for an individual citizen, so that half the population reaches that age and 'entitlements' are only provided for the remaining half (this concept works for all the 'entitlements' that are age dependent).

Thus if there is an increase in life expectancy, the 'expected' ratio of those utilizing an age-based entitlement will expand as more people live beyond the set age limit.  This was a phenomena not unknown even in the 1930's and the 20th century had seen only one serious time when life expectancy dropped globally, and that was due not to war but the Spanish Flu outbreak post-WWI.  Here are two graphs encompassing that data:

US Life Expectancy

Source: CJ Seymour, The Coming Great Depression

Global Life Expectancy

Source: Working Paper on Inequality and Mortality: Long-Run Evidence from a Panel of Countries
By Andrew Leigh and Christopher Jencks
Harvard University

Creating any system based on providing money or services to an elderly population then must take into account the change in the number of elderly over time.  Will it be steady, decrease or increase over time?

Progressive politics sells itself on 'steady-state' analysis in which nothing changes in underlying particulars.  Thus when doing a forecast of taxation increases Progressives do not look at how behavior will change to avoid such taxes, which is a part of human nature.  Income from increased taxes never reach expected amounts and, quite contrarily, often go down per percentage point added in comparison to previous tax percentages.  On 'entitlements' the feel good idea of there always being a set number of elderly misses the point that there is no set number of elderly in a growing, thriving society, and that to keep a demographic balance requires there to be no social, medical or family-type changes, so as to maintain the set ratios of the enactment of the 'entitlement'.

Another factor when looking at increased life expectancy is the change in the amount of time each person spends in the labor market to provide work to pay taxes to 'sustain' the entitlement.  Here I will take a paragraph from my previous work:

Clearly this is not 'insurance' but some sort of 'assurance' by the government. Insurance is payment to plans that will pay out if something happens: you are paying in the bet that something will happen to you, and the insurer takes such payments in the bet that they will not. Those that live in the modern, industrialized United States have some great expectation that they will live to see 'retirement age' and then live for a decade or even two after that. If one lives to be 85 or so, 20 years can be expected at the end of not doing much in the way of work. Add that to the 18 years or so of education to get to High School level, and nearly 40 years of one's life is spent not working at a job, about 45%. Compare that to the 20 years spent (approx.) and retiring at age 63 and that is only 20 years or 31% of one's life spent in learning and 'retirement'. At this point in time, via SSN, the Federal Government is mandating that an individual, to be eligible for payout from the system, is to spend 14% more of their life in leisure than their grandparents. Great work if you can get it, which you can in the US.

Currently it is not as bad as 85 years, but only 78 years (via the CDC using 2007 figures).  So the 'adjustment' to put in place circa 2030 of 70 years of age for SSA doesn't even match the original program's matching of life expectancy back in 1937.  Thus demographics will kill SSA even with a slow change to a 70 year old use system as there will be a large percentage of the population living past 70 that will overburden the system.

Here there is an additional factor to consider in and that is the delta change in life expectancy over time.  Which is to say: how many years does it take to up the life expectancy on average by 1 year?

If you answered that as 6, then you are looking at the beginning of the 20th century, and if you answered 4, then you are looking at the end of the 20th century.  The delta change, that is the change to the rate of change, is increasing over time.  So a static analysis applied today using a 4:1 ratio means that by 2030, a mere 19 years away, we will have added 4 years and change on to the life expectancy.  Thus the average life expectancy will be about 82 in 2030, and broken out by sex that will put women in their mid-80's and men in their late 70's, unless that break-out changes over time, as well, with improved health care for men.

Politicians hate demographics because it impacts population based programs in a major way over time.  Yet all projections are done either using static analysis or set change rate analysis, and none are done with behavioral changes or dynamically increasing change rates over time.  Thus no matter how much anyone 'wants' government to 'help' on 'social security' it will fail not due to the meanness of any political party or due to the lack of competence in running such programs, but due to the pure population dynamics reflected in demographics.

Part of the adjustment to living longer and having a better chance of surviving child birth and a child surviving past age 5 is to have a smaller family size.  That part of demographics begins to reduce the expected increase in overall population size as fewer children are born due to their high survival rates.  All the way into the late 19th and even early 20th century it was a common occurrence for a child to die at birth or before reaching age 5.  After the introduction of large scale sewer systems, public health systems to clean up water supplies and antibiotics (plus treatment of childhood diseases) that began to change and was remarkable throughout the 20th century that contrary to the population boom expectations and dire consequences, the demographic lines for population expansion globally were starting to plateau out. 

Here the entrance of India to becoming a modernized economy and China modernizing and instituting a 'one child policy' started the shift from youngster oriented world demographics to middle-age demographics with Europe and Japan shifting to old-age demographic types.  Family sizes in Europe plummeted from highs of 5 children in the poorer countries early in the century to lows of barely 2 children in those same countries by the end of the century.  The more 'developed' parts of Europe were seen as slowly losing their native populations starting in the early 21st century.  In the US this changed from a 3.2 children per family to 2.6 children per family, which is enough to maintain and even marginally increase population size over time, but not enough to get back to the early century's 4-5 children per family in the US.  That latter was the era which SSA was cast, so by post-WWII the demographics to sustain the program were already in jeopardy.

Thus there are two vectors at work which are not amenable to politics save in a negative way, which is to say destroying the public health infrastructure and forcing large families via edict, that are only indirectly related to economics but drive the economics of programs like nobody's business.  Increasing life expectancy happens when general health conditions for a population improves and this is more due to public health initiatives (clean water, sewage treatment and vaccinations) which are relatively low cost and easy to do.  The upshot of those initiatives, however, is a better understanding of diseases, how they change and spread, thus leading to better treatments of them.  That gets you a more capable medical system, overall, which is somewhat higher cost but able to extend life past the onslaught of early childhood diseases and then geared towards the diseases of the elderly.  Due to these factors and grand-parents living much, much longer lives, the breakup of the 'nuclear family' happened not so much due to 'liberation' movements but due to the grand-parents able to live longer, healthier lives and care for themselves better, longer. 

In theory these should be the relatively rich segment of the population, able to better prepare through their mid-adult life with a smaller family and increase marginal savings so as to grow their investments over time.  That is the case with many elderly, but with SSA as an 'entitlement' that they 'paid into', savings started to actually decrease over time.  The government forcing a 'retirement age' (and that is only upon the non-wealthy who can retire whenever they want or NEVER as the case may be) and then put 'means testing' on getting medical 'entitlements' meant that a system of gutting the savings of seniors to get 'entitlements' started via enforced 'retirement' when many were still able to contribute in meaningful jobs up to their last day before 'retirement'.  Plus the idea was that they had an extra decade or more of life still ahead of them... supported by younger, poorer working families.

This brings up some salient questions:

1) Is there any way to actually have such an 'entitlement' system at all?  Not one that depends on age as a determining factor, especially old age, no.  At some point early in this century we will pass the 3:1 ratio for adding an additional year on to life expectancy and after that it will be 2:1.  Thus for every two years of time you get an added year of life expectancy.  When that ratio reaches 1:1 you have near immortality.  Barring a total collapse of civilization or even a partial collapse of the Nation State system and impoverishment of the wealthy, this isn't changing any time soon.  Either of those events would set humanity back a couple of generations and see a massive decline in global life expectancy as the technical infrastructure to address public health and diseases go into decline or collapse.

2) Is the concept of 'retirement' even valid given the trends?  No.  Gerontocracies, that is governments run by the aged for the aged, is a trend in parts of Europe (Germany, France, parts of Scandinavia) and a force in Japan and Russia.  These countries are facing a greater than 1:1 worker to elderly ratio, and anything that raises the number of elderly as a proportion of society then obviates any 'retirement' concept: there are too many non-working people to sustain society and the economy.  That is a broad over-generalization, of course, but even when factoring in automation and productivity increases, the consuming of high productivity items will also tend to keep pace with output per person, and the number on the old age side then factor in as a major consumer of all goods in the economy.

3) Is the concept of 'old age' viable any more?  To a degree, yes, so long as the keys to stopping the degradation of DNA in cells isn't found, it will continue to be a generally viable concept.  What is interesting is the amount of work going into that 'Holy Grail' of generalized ageing, and our understanding of ageing as a 'disease' is slowly taking root.  If the government can keep from ruining the economic system, it is possible to see a 'cure' for this 'disease' within the span between now and 2030.  As a disease ageing is generalized, wide-spread and pandemic: everyone gets it.  Thus there must be keys to it that are, strangely enough, easier than going against an auto-immune disorder like MS or Type I Diabetes or Lupus.  As ageing was not seriously approached as a 'disease' in the 20th century, the early discoveries in the 21st that do see it as a 'disease' hold much promise.  And that 1:1 ratio is not all that far off, even for the middle-aged in our modern times.  Until that 'cure' is found, the general degradation of an individual's body can be put off (that is life extended) by working on secondary problems and maintaining a generally healthy life, longer.  Better diet assuredly played a major role in the change rate of change for life expectancy.

4) How can we address the cost of health care that is ever spiraling?  The cost of health care, that is the physical addressing of needs, office space and even most medications have remained affordable for decades in the US.  What has changed is the health care 'system' with the intervention of the government in the 1960's with Medicare and Medicaid.  These two systems do not pay off to the cost of procedures and medications.  The 'discount' that seniors get is a cost-shifting via government to practitioners and hospitals which then must raise costs elsewhere.  Even more interesting is that each time this question is posed it can be compared to treatments available in 1970-72 and, adjusting for inflation, the medications of that era are very cheap and the procedures once rare, then (like open heart surgery) are now widely available and relatively cheap.  The cost is in the provisioning system for these items, not in the skills or equipment to do them, or even the cost of medication production for that era-specific suite of medications.  Of course better, faster and even cheaper ways to do heart surgery have arrived, as well as medications that could not even be dreamt of in the 1970's.  You are, today, getting more effective and, thusly, more cost effective medications and procedures today, than your counter-parts did in the 1970's either as inflation adjusted costs or real costs.  The delta in health care is the provisioning via 'insurance' and from the government, both of which add on overhead, accounting costs and burden to the system in order to get 'discounts' that then get cost-shifted through the entire system, raising costs.  To remove the inflator of overhead and accounting, it is necessary to remove the middle-men who add cost but no value to the system.  In this the pure 'outpatient, seen on demand clinic' is now appearing at a very low cost per visit to address this need that government and insurers cannot meet.

5) What happens to the 'social safety net' in this new age of increased life expectancy?  It vanishes.  When your effective 'old age' passes 80, you are no longer in any real need of a 'social safety net' as you should be spending your adult life learning how to work and to adjust to ever changing working conditions.  This means that concepts that have been cherished as part of the Progressive agenda, like a minimum wage, become unsustainable as one cannot put any real 'floor' on wages when a person is expecting to work for decades.  Upwards achievement at some aspect of work related life, given 5-6 decades of working life, means that there is no floor that is meaningful to an individual: we will all be seeing that life is long and that no one can extend your childhood for decades at a time.  This is not a mean-spirit concept, one that seeks to impoverish the young as we are already doing that via the 'social safety net' and set-age systems that don't work, which then cost-shift debt from the old to the young.  Once the ceiling is removed, that is 'old age' becomes a concept that is not very related to life expectancy, then there is no reason for a 'floor' economically: very few people are so incompetent as to have NO viable work skill that will allow them even a modest advancement throughout life.  Even so, for those there is this thing known as 'charity', which is fellow citizens helping each other with the lowest of possible overhead cost, directly.  Only those who are mean of spirit and hard of heart say that they cannot trust their fellow citizens in times of need.  Look at Japan's recent earthquake and tsunami and ask yourself: would you help your fellow man at such times?  If so then why on Earth are you not doing so NOW?  It is not your fellow man that is hard of heart, but you who ask such a question and contribute nothing to charity and doubt the good will of your fellow citizens at every turn.

 

In summary the concepts of demographics are vital moving forces in society, as they effect more than just population size or even cohort size and type, but extend deeply across time to change the nature and outlook of individuals within society.  Semi-valid concepts from the late 19th century cannot cope with modern, dynamic analysis of demographic changes, and even those that came to be in the 20th century that did not address demographic changes, are now put seriously at peril by them.  Japan went from a young, vibrant but militaristic culture in the beginning of the 20th century to a pacifistic, ageing culture in the late 20th century: their entire nature as a society had changed in profound ways that influenced their demographics.  Such changes in society also play parts in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and everywhere technology helps to improve public health even modestly.  The basics of clean water, sanitation, vaccination and wholesome food are huge movers in demographic profiles: in Ancient Rome the demographics changed significantly when these public works were put in and the Nation went from a Republic to an Empire.

Some ideas we have from the past of old age are in rapid flux, and yet our governmental systems are lagging and badly, unable to adjust to the changes even in a single decade, not to speak of five or six of them.  The ideas that came with old age, that of some 'retirement' are more a product of politics than any reality: in the past people before the Progressive era made their own retirement whenever they could, and that was not dictated to by government.  Today the original employees of Microsoft made millions, often billions, of dollars and many retired... only to find retirement dull and that they wanted to make new careers and businesses for themselves.  The rich can retire whenever they want, which is why we have the 'idle rich' as a fantasy.  In reality the rich go from business to business, or simply re-invest their money in new companies, new ways of doing things, and into our society by doing that.  Yet, today, a car is car, no matter what the cost, and the value of a roof over one's head is stable, no matter how impoverished or rich the trappings are.  You can only live in one house at a time, drive one car at a time, and only take in so much entertainment at one sitting: the rich have more options, but are not necessarily leading richer lives for all those options.  And many of the 'rich' are small business owners, taking little pay for themselves so they can support their company.  Yet their 'income' via the business makes them 'rich', even though they have a modest house and car, they may employ tens, hundreds, thousands or more people.  It is the rich, investing in companies large and small, that created the tools and means necessary to bring us an affordable, decent life.  They are only villains when they use their power to gain favor to no longer be treated equally by government: those companies must go as they are predators on the body politic and society, no matter what 'good' they do they erode the moral character of the economy by their ends.

And when your life is extended past 80 years of age, and an 80 that is well kept and vibrant, who is to say that you won't be amongst the 'rich'?

Why ask government to punish you through taxes when you can build society via charity and providing jobs and actually doing something worthwhile with your life?  You will still have weekends for the golf course.

Simplicity budgeting

The following is cross-posted from Dumb Looks, Still Free on 15 FEB 2011.

With the latest White House budget put out by President Obama, there is little in the way of actual spending cuts or regulatory reform going on, and much in the way of increasing spending and taxation. This as the government nears its debt limit ceiling.

Again.

The lack of 'Hope & Change' in this budget for FY 2012 has been noted by many on the Left and Right, and that the Administration lacks the ability to actually show that anyone in the Administration understands the ramifications of the 2010 elections are plain: Stop The Spending. Yes, Stop The Spending is meeting Stuck On Stupid.

Interestingly enough the budget process for FY 2012 (not the FY 2011 work that is due soon) will be different than what has been going on since the 1960's, as outlined in this Politico article by Jake Sherman & Jonathan Allen on 01 DEC 2010:

House Republicans are devising a plan to simplify spending decisions by considering government funding bills on a department-by-department basis in the new Congress, according to Republican insiders.

The move would facilitate cutbacks in government programs and, GOP aides say, enhance oversight and accountability for individual agencies, fulfilling promises made by Republicans on the campaign trail and in their Pledge to America. But it would also threaten to complicate an already tattered appropriations process on the House floor and in negotiations with the Senate, which is why the mechanics of the transition are still under discussion.

In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute earlier this year, Speaker-designate John Boehner (R-Ohio) outlined the idea that he, Republican transition chief Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and rank-and-file Republicans are now working to implement.

"Let's do away with the concept of 'comprehensive' spending bills. Let's break them up, to encourage scrutiny, and make spending cuts easier. Rather than pairing agencies and departments together, let them come to the House floor individually, to be judged on their own merit," he said at AEI more than a month before the midterm election. "Members shouldn't have to vote for big spending increases at the Labor Department in order to fund Health and Human Services. Members shouldn't have to vote for big increases at the Commerce Department just because they support NASA. Each department and agency should justify itself each year to the full House and Senate, and be judged on its own."

This is the way budgeting used to be done before the Cold War got into full swing: Congress decided the budget for each part of government separately. The unitary budget process creates a huge ball of wax and the 'take it or leave it' form of governing, in which much bad can be packed into a bill that covers the entire federal government. It is a way to hide spending and force 'compromise' not only amongst parties in Congress but with the President. It is also highly irresponsible as each part of government should receive a separate review and be divided from other agencies to see if it is carrying out its duties in an effective manner consistent with its enabling legislation and the Constitution.

Doing it this way, piece by piece, affords opportunities for savings, reductions or changes in the way an agency works, and a review of an agency each and every year in a way that unitary budget process requirements do not meet. By allowing pork to be packed into a unitary budget, good oversight and control of the fiscal side of government, by Congress, is over-ridden by political needs to 'get things funded'. Congressionally Directed Actions put in by individual Congresscritters means that those items are not properly budget for in the Operations & Management portions of those agencies getting such funds. All accounting for those funds must be done on the set operational budget that does NOT include the earmarks. This stretches staff and reduces proper Congressionally mandated oversight on spending and puts a direct line by individual Congresscritters into government departments. By removing the opportunity for political abuse of the unitary budget process, the actual abuse is expected to diminish.

Beyond that salutary effect, however, there is something even better with this process: cutting budgets of individual departments or agencies, or even requiring that they schedule to reduce their overall size or disband completely. This form of budgeting to remove an agency is rarer, still, as Congress so rarely does this as to make such times noticeable, as I pointed out in another piece. That is the formal 'tell the agency it is time to tidy up and go home' form of Congressional budgeting. There is the other form when no spending is coming forth via the budgetary process to fund a department or agency: shutdown.

With the unitary budget process that is an all or nothing affair: either the entire government is funded or it isn't. That is a game of 'chicken' with the government held hostage to it. Thus an 'across the board' cut to all departments becomes an all or nothing affair if you use this process. When you go to piecemeal budgeting, then you get individual parts of the government segregated out for funding. This is a powerful legislative tool as it can serve very well in the hands of those seeking to remove power from government via the expedient means of not funding those parts with the power. Congress is obligated to fund very little of the federal government: servicing the debt, DoD, salaries in the three branches, the Mint, USPTO, parts of Commerce and the IRS, a piece or two of Interior, government archives, duties related to the border on immigration and naturalization as well as the orderly processing of goods individuals at the border, a postal system, plus any necessary buildings for those activities. Those are the mandatory parts of the budget, per year. Everything else is discretionary, and I do mean EVERYTHING including 'entitlements' as individuals have no contractual right (via Megan McArdle) to expect anything from SSA, Medicare or Medicaid:

Well, sort of. The first thing to point out is that legally, changing social security benefits would not be default, because (as the Supreme Court has already ruled), beneficiaries have no legal, contractual right to their benefits. They enjoy them at the sufferance of Congress, and Congress has the perfect right to change them. Doing so will not affect our status as a borrower adversely in the eyes of people we actually borrow money from. Indeed, it might enhance it. The first thing a lender wants to know is not whether you are a good person, but whether you are likely to repay the money they lend you; they are interested in the former only insofar as it implicates the latter.

During the Johnson Administration the system lost its 'lock box' with 'account' concept as all funds were available from SSA to the general fund by putting Treasury Bills in their place for future promise of payment. So servicing the debt includes those bills held by SSA. More importantly is that all the 'entitlements' are at the sufferance of Congress and are, thusly, discretionary spending.

Putting 'entitlements' to the end of the line after the mandatory funding parts, and then dealing with the rest of the discretionary budget, first, allows for a few things to be done.

First, austerity packages to federal departments and agencies can be created and passed by the House to demonstrate that it 'gets the message' of 2010.

Secondly the Senate is put into a position of a House unwilling to bump spending up for anything and it is the Senate then faced with the 'pass it or lose it' deal. This is so because a House can clearly say that in not passing a spending bill for something like, say, the EPA or Dept. of Agriculture, that the Senate clearly is in the 'clean sweep' mode and just wishes to do away with them. Then the House thanks the Senate for its fiscal responsibility and does NOTHING further on that department or agency. It passed what it had to pass and the Senate is free to pass that. Really, who is going to 'lobby' for the Dept. of Education beyond the Teacher's Union? Who will actually be HURT if the Dept. of Agriculture goes under? Monsanto?

Third the Senate, faced with either austerity or nothing, passes austerity and puts THAT on the President's desk. He has the exact, same choice as the Senate: if he wants a part of government to go away, he can simply not sign the bill. And get THANKED by the House for his fiscal rectitude.

Yes, games will be played on the 'if you agree to pass this bitsy program then I will pass/sign that bitsy program' but that would only be with the Senate. The House can say that austerity is the rule from here on out, and get used to it.

The group of Republicans following the Tea Party elections of 2010 offer enough of a block to be able to block parts of the budget as they have already demonstrated on things like the Patriot Act. This puts Democrats in the nasty position of having the 'chance' to show up the fiscally responsible House members by joining with the few remaining fiscally irresponsible Republicans to try and pass a 'bi-partisan' budget that is not responsible.

Mind you that is a career ender for 2012, which would see a return of those following their constituents and an angry populace voting out the irresponsible House (and Senate) members.

By doing it this way the line gets clearly drawn about who is serious about fiscal responsibility and who isn't.

And because 2012 will be looming, angering the voting public really isn't such a hot idea and that may even sway the irresponsible ones just a smidgen.

Then you tackle 'entitlement' reform... because everyone, up and down the line, will see that you are serious about cutting spending EVERYWHERE which will include 'entitlements'. Be a shame if the Senate or President didn't want to fund those, no?

Brought to you by A Citizen of the Republic

A rule of thumb that is wrong

You know the old saying from the Middle East:

'The enemy of my enemy is my friend'.

 

It is pretty straightforward that the people vexing your enemy are helping you, right?  Really you need to support that, don't you?

Unfortunately they aren't 'on your side' as they are going after their own cause and agenda and not yours, so while the vexation may be fun to watch, these doing the vexing are in no way, shape or form a 'friend' to you.

 

Now logically stated is the following:

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy.

This one is not only correct but has a corollary to it on what the strategy is for your enemy and his enemy:

Let's you and him fight.

This is the happy strategy of minor nations throughout history that have two major nations lusting after wealth, territory, and other things tangible or intangible in the minor nation.  This was done by Vienna during the two Ottoman invasions that threatened the city.  Since the local military was dwarfed by the incoming Ottoman armies, the plea to get a larger, regional power to defend Vienna went out.  Poland was a relatively large power for that era, as the area we call Germany was still a lot of squabbling Principalities, and while the Poles may not have had any great affection for the Viennese, they knew that if the Ottomans got Vienna they would be able to stage attacks to devour the Germanic Principalities and actually threaten Poland.

Poland changed that around in the 1920's and got defensive alliances with France and the UK against Germany, so that if Poland was invaded then France and the UK would have to bail her out.  Germany used a hoax to make it look like Poland had attacked Germany, but no one as fooled by that and the invasion of Poland started the official start of WWII, since fighting between Japan and China had been ongoing for years, by then, and Japan as an ally of Germany the attack got a globe spanning war.  This is the diplomatic variation of 'Let's you and him fight' as the Polish army and defenses were sub-par to say the least so that horse mounted cavalry had to face off against tanks.

The US used a version of this in the Iran/Iraq war of the early 1980's, by supplying both sides of the fight with arms: Iraq openly, although not with a lot of material, and Iran clandestinely in the Iran/Contra deal which saw a limited amount of very effective weapons against tanks get sent to Iran which had very little in its arsenal to compare to them.  Henry Kissinger summed it up as a war in which we wished both sides would lose.  That is one of the most quintessential variants of 'Let's you and him fight' that has been seen in the modern era.

So, if applied to a present-day case, like Libya, what would the response of the US be to rebels going against He Who's Name Can't Be Spelled Correctly?

The first few days of dithering is indicative of having no policy for such events when our enemies are attacked by their enemies.  The old Bush Doctrine was that we were the supporters of those seeking 'democracy' in the Middle East, but that was not immediately deployed.  Instead the idea of wanting 'regime change' in Libya was used when it looked like the rebels were going to win the thing.  The President said that He Who's Name Can't Be Spelled Correctly must go.

Ok, good enough on the old sorts of concepts: we didn't like the guy and would like to see him gone.

Then the Carter Doctrine of 'dithering' was deployed.

He Who's Name Can't Be Spelled Correctly rallied his supporters, paid off lots of mercenaries and thugs to fight for him, started bombing anyone in rebel held cities and generally was acting the part of a brutal dictator... because he IS a brutal dictator.

At that point the US has a wide array of options.

- We can say that the leader of Libya had ordered attacks under no auspices of normal Nation State war against US military personnel in Germany (plus German civilians) and had taken down a US commercial aircraft over Lockerbie, Scotland which was an act of Piracy, as Congress has extended the coverage of the Laws of the Sea to US commercial air carriers.  We could point out that US policy has not embraced Libya's leader, that we have not forgiven him and that he was no longer seen as a valid leader of any Nation but a Pirate with a Piratical State under his control and that we considered him and any cronies still with him and supporting him to be Pirates.  That there was no government of Libya that we recognized and would welcome people in Libya to form an interim government that we could help.

- We could use our clandestine offices to try and get a hit squad into Libya as we no longer saw the Unspellable One's rule as legitimate and that he was a threat to us and had attacked us in the past.  He wanted personal war, and we are obliging.

- We could seek the help of regime personnel who had fled after the rebels started their campaign, put a 'government in exile' together with a very sketchy constitution or other ruling document, hire some mercenaries to help them get those who wanted to fight in shape, and landed a government with tiny force to broker with the rebels to bring them into an official government fold.

These are effective ways to deal with such threats from official delegitimization of the current regime to a bit of clandestine work to get rid of the lynch pin of the regime, its leader, all the way to doing the old fashioned 'right thing' and getting a real government of ex-government officials together, giving them some backing and getting them on the ground so that there would be an official group to then plea for military and commercial aid.

See how that works?

What did we do?

We froze the leader's bank accounts.  About $30 billion in cash in the US.

We looked for a 'blockade'.  How that would work with wanting to supply rebels and such makes your guess as good as mine.  Blockades have timetables of years to decades, not hours to months, to have an effect, by the way.

We thought about a No Fly Zone, passed on that until the French and UK got together on it to 'protect the rebels' and also to stop any damage to the oilfields in Libya.  If you did the first you could get some help on the second, so we decided to join up!  Then we would lead!  Then we wouldn't lead!  It was multinational!  We were going to do it all!  We were going to hand it all off to some political talking group!  Then we would hand it off to NATO!  We were only taking out regime air assets, save for the tanks and such we started to go after as a 'coalition'.

This is not a 'doctrine': it is incoherent.

The address the President gave last night is not a doctrine, either, it is a mixture of statements and feel good phrases that are meant to be applied everywhere, but only really apply to Libya, unless they don't apply at all.  It isn't being applied to the similar circumstances in: Ivory Coast, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, Jordan, and even the uprisings in China, come to that.

In theory all we want is the Unspellable One out of power, perhaps with a nice permanent vacation in Venezuela, Land of the Tyrants.

With announcements that al Qaeda is part and parcel of the rebels, with a leader who actually fought against the US in Afghanistan, we now know that we have two enemies fighting each other in Libya.  Something we should have gotten word about from our ever less-than-capable INTEL Community, say, about 3-5 days into things, not 3-4 weeks later and only then by the actual leader's own transmissions.

What was the right strategy that anyone, with an ounce of sense in their heads, could see when our enemy has an unknown enemy that really isn't seeking big favors and promises us NOTHING if we help?

Do we even have a dog in that fight?  Mind you that is way, way, way before the revel leader announced he was trained in Libya to fight for al Qaeda against the US and Coalition Forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq.  Just taken on purely face value, with the knowns of the time, do we really want to support the enemy of our enemy if they have given no indication of how they feel towards us?  It is possible to get worse than the Unspellable One, you know?  The current regime in Iran points to that.  As did Saddam Hussein.  And the Magical Kingdom of Mr. Kim in NoKo.  The Congo.  Somalia. Parts of Detroit and Chicago.

When your enemy has an enemy, and he has not said anything about being friendly to you, then he is just your enemy's enemy.

They really should fight it out amongst themselves.

That is not 'isolationism' but pure, unadulterated common sense.

Let's you and him fight.  We will figure out what to do once you two have gotten things settled. 

We might even send arms to both sides if we find them both hostile to us... stranger things are happening, you know?

What is a Nation State?

The following is an opinion piece by The Jacksonian Party.

This is pretty simple, no?  Everyone has a good idea of what a Nation looks like, in form, even when that form varies from the early City States to the modern Nation State, we can definitely put our fingers on a few salient points that define Nations.

First off is that they have a declared government.  This can be anything from a Warlord putting his cohorts in place with an iron fist all the way to people on a small speck of land banding together to use a representative democracy to run a republic.  Either way a known set of people who work within a confines of a geographic area, with a people in it and an orderly system of government are key points in the Nation State business.  The Nation has accountable actors who act in the name of the people of that territory.

Second is that many Nations are born in blood from previous regimes that did not reflect the will of the people or who were deposed by invading armies or from the turmoil of an upset order that fell apart.  Peaceful change is to be sought at every turn, but not every ruler or government is willing to recognize the will of the people to get rid of them.    Thus fighting usually starts before an actual new government can get in place.

There is a critical juncture between the First and the Second and that is the ability to get help from the outside if you are fighting to depose a government.

Note that governments are only imposed after being on the losing side of a war: the winning side gets to dictate terms.  Coming to power with no governmental structure means you have no orderly means of actually running the Nation, even temporarily, until a new government is set up.  That is why many of the mechanisms of the prior government live on for months or years after the defeat of the prior regime: they are necessary to keep things going.  Hated?  Most likely.  Necessary?  By and large, yes.

To take two examples:

- In the American Revolution the build up to 1776 via prior incidents put forward a group of representatives willing to stake a claim for a new government.  They declared independence and the very next thing they did (beyond circulating the declaration) was put a new government in place.  That was the Articles of Confederation, which was the interim government that allowed other governments to back the new government.  Thus Poland would send us our first Light Cavalry and France would later give us troops, arms and cash to help against the British.  All that time fighting was going on, but a recognized chain of command from the new government to Gen. Washington was established.  It didn't work that well, but it did work and the form of accountability was put in place.

- In Iraq after OIF the government of Iraq dissolved.  Not by order, that was the after-thought, but by the civil service leaving their places in government and leaving a mess behind.  The loss of control meant a loss of order and looting ensued, as well as a general uprising against the old regime.  There would be long, long months to getting a local interim government put in place to help settle things down and then the agenda to get a new constitution passed would involve more months of bloodshed as scores were settled and outsiders attempted to thwart the standing up of the new government.  That interim government was responsible for the obligations of goods and services, so it gained recognition outside of Iraq from Nations wanting to have commerce with Iraq and support it.  That has been a messy route, yes, but necessary as letting the locals control their own destiny after deposing a genocidal tyrant unable to stick to his war-time treaty was no longer acceptable.

Both instances have timing involved - in America the revolution had basically started before independence was declared, yet in Iraq the government was removed by it being attacked and then dissolving in its very offices when defenses broke down.  Getting an interim government up was critical to both Nations, and they were Nations as they were they were considered sovereigns either by declaration (in the US) or recent custom (in Iraq).

In general it is not wise to support any uprising, rebellion or set of actors looking to overthrow a regime that does NOT put down their system of government, who is accountable and the territory they will oversee with consent of the governed.  That is why the US needed a government to survive the early months of its war with the mother country, and why the insurgents in Iraq were seen as puppets of foreign powers: the accountability system is the 'sniff test' of a Nation.

If you don't have it, you reek of barbarism.

You, as an individual, may not like certain Nation's governments, but that is for the people in the Nation to work out, not for you to help 'decide' from the outside.  I don't like despots, tyrants, dictators, and warlords overmuch, but if the people they are over can't figure out how bad they are and get rid of them, then there is little that I can or should do for them from the outside.   Sympathize with their plight?  Yes.  Beg my government to intercede?  No.  Opposition is one thing, interceding where the locals can't buy a clue is something else, again.

That now brings up Egypt, Libya and other fun places with insurrections going on, like Tunisia and even China.  What should the US policy be?

Well, how about requiring the locals to get serious, first off?  Insurrection, rebellion, revolution are all parts of changing a government you don't like, but the ballot box should work as well.  If you don't have elections and the government will not recognize that the people are the sovereign actors of the Nation to create a Nation, then you get the bloodier, nastier way of doing things.  That is all understood.  So what, exactly, do these upstarts want to replace the old system with and what is the territory they will be held responsible for, and who is doing this stuff?

That gets to the crux of the matter, that junction between First and Second: if you don't know what you want or who is being trusted to run the show then why, exactly, should anyone on the outside recognize such a rebellion as in need of 'help'?  You may not like the dictator, despot, tyrant, regime, warlord, etc. in charge, but if those in opposition won't stand up for something other than being anti-regime, then you aren't likely to get a good outcome.  Quite the opposite as that is how such notorious regimes usually start: rebels without a clue beyond wanting power.

Thus in Egypt the people had a general uprising against the regime and it, finally, stepped down and handed running the show over to the military.  Now there are drafts for a new constitution coming about, with a more or less legitimate interim regime in place.  Its strange that those wanting the regime change couldn't say, exactly, what they wanted to replace it.  It is one thing to have a government deposed by outside forces who then get to figure out what to do and quite another when you take to the streets without a clue as to what you really want as a form of government.  That path to mob rule isn't pretty and usually lasts until a dictator or junta can kill its way to power and get some cronies to be strongmen for the new regime.  And if that starts to sound like the old regime... well... if you don't know what it is, exactly, you want then you are unlikely to get something to make you 'feel' better in this realm.

In Tunisia the dictator has fled, but what of the government?  It is in disrepute but a newer system hasn't really come about, yet.  For such a well educated people they should be able to figure out the cart - horse order of things.

Things are less well formed in: Yemen, KSA, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Syria.

Iran has the Green Movement (not an environmental movement) but that seems stalled on the verge of doing things and its leaders are being rounded up by the thinning old regime.

China is cracking down and paying people to stop the insurrection's communications.  Good luck on that, I tellya.

Libya has the problem of rebels who were very successful and were even rumored to be putting a constitution together.  They really, and for true, should have done that.

Why?

It could be announced as part of foreign policy that the old regime was no longer recognized as sovereign and the new regime was.  Money, arms, supplies and all the rest of it could flow from Nations recognizing the new government and then blockade the old one.  What took months back in 1776 now takes minutes to hours.  Rebels with a constitution, putting on identifiers and generally having a recognized chain of command means they are serious about getting a new government in place, even on an interim basis, and can be supported.

They didn't do that.

We can't recognize them as a government as they aren't one.

See that part about what happens when you are clueless about what you want to do once you win after fighting?  That is where Libya is.  Egypt, at least, has a government that knows it is interim.  Libya has a government under the old regime, and the rebels are unable to figure out that they need a new form of legitimacy to get things rolling their way.

Rebels without a clue.

Putting the cart before the horse.

Helping the clueless when they demonstrate they are clueless usually doesn't end well for all concerned.

I don't like He Who's Name Can't Be Spelled Consistently.

I have no good feeling about the current rebels, at all.

Wanting to get rid of a tyrant is all well and good, but could we have the guarantee, in writing, that you actually do have an idea of what it is you want afterwards?  Otherwise this is just your standard tyrant swap during a coup.

Put up and demonstrate your morals and ethics, and your willingness to be held accountable.

Or don't.

The first gets you a new government, and that can have a bloody end, but at least you are willing to stick up for your fellow citizens and a better way of doing things.

The latter is tyranny for tyranny, despot for despot, and coup after coup.

Thus America's answer should be: put up a government, draw your line in the sand, be held accountable, put on uniforms and then we will think long and hard about supporting you as you are showing you are willing to do the hard work of creating a better government after the show is over.

That is, however, sane and rational.

I'm not expecting that any time soon, and we will rue the day we gave up being civilized for transient ends.