What would a Tea Party foreign policy look like?

Is there a Tea Party foreign policy?

In general it can be said that the Tea Party movement is concerned with local and National affairs, and this is true   of the branches of the Tea Party that are being seen in the UK, Italy, Israel, Australia and even in such places as Russia and China (the Vodka Party and a more underground movement in China).  Getting local and National government under control so that it stops wild spending, gets out of people's lives and lowers taxation, all while continuing to pay down debt, is the main target of the Tea Party organizations.  Foreign policy has been outside the realm of this, which has allowed some National politicians like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to try and craft some sort of foreign policy out of Reaganism or Libertarianism.  There is a problem in trying to graft on a foreign policy outlook that doesn't grow from the sentiments of a movement: it is likely to be rejected in whole or in part by the movement.  Worse is that it can serve as a 'wedge issue' that could split up Tea Party organizations into factions.

What has not been attempted is to look at the foundations of the interior of the movement and ask: what grows from this as a foreign policy?

Key issues internally beyond taxes are sustained by the support of the Natural Rights of Man as Individual.  Thus Liberty and Freedom for the individual are the underpinning for the tax and small government message.  By removing power to do things at the local and National level from government, the things done then devolve down to the people to address at a more localized level.  Foreign policy is the direction of a Nation as a whole and how it interacts with brother Nations.  If we seek to sustain liberty and freedom at home and have a government that recognizes that all rights and power come from the people, then should that not be a defining part of a Tea Party foreign policy?

If this is put center stage then there is an outgrowth from that in that the Tea Party movement seeks to recognize that the power of the individual is paramount and that those Nations that wish to befriend the US must also have similar sanctuary from tyranny for the rights of the individual FROM government.  That makes the Bill of Rights and the general rights secured by the US Constitution a touchstone to how we approach brother Nations, and in that we have a ready-made list of actual items that brother Nations that wish to be friendly to the US must have:

- Freedom of conscience

- Freedom of religion

- Freedom of speech

- Freedom of the press

- Freedom to peaceably assemble

- Freedom to petition government

These are Freedoms FROM government regulation, and even the US has fallen down on the job as its political elites have determined that government must be an arbiter of these things for the people.  Yet that power is not granted to it, thus all laws dealing with restricting these freedoms are against the US Constitution.  Even the famous 'not yelling fire in a crowded theater' is a LOCAL and STATE concern and is one of attaching liability, by law, to actual actions of malice towards others.  Hateful language is protected, language used to stampede people so as to harm them is not protected not because it is an exercise of speech but is abridging civil speech to coerce others to panic with a threat to their lives.  You don't yell fire in a crowded theater: you get up in front of all people and point out that there is a fire in the room and it needs to be evacuated in an orderly fashion so that all can be safe from it.  That might still get people killed, yes, but that has devolved responsibility of those reactions to the individuals by giving them the information necessary to make a decision.  That is the civil use of freedom of speech, and all freedoms have responsibilities that go hand-in-hand with them to uphold them as a freedom for all people.

After this comes additional rights from government.

- The right to keep and bear arms

- The right to not have troops or government agents stationed in your home

- The right to security in your papers, property and person

- The right not to self-incriminate

- The right to a jury trial by your peers

This goes on for a bit more, but the point is made that these are actual rights and freedoms to be exercised.  From the legacy of Great Britain comes these rights and they were hammered out to keep monarchs, which is to say the head of government, from encroaching more and more on the liberties of individuals and their freedoms by passing laws against certain activities that intruded into these areas.

It should be noted that the right to keep and bear arms is an adjunct to the Natural Right and Liberty of being armed and that as the negative form, which is to say offensive warfare, is relegated to the State, the positive form, that is defense from war, defense of the State, defense of life, papers and property... indeed defense of all other Civil Rights is backed by the Natural Right and positive Natural Liberty of defensive warfare and self-defense.  As our works and property are gained by exercising our freedom and liberty to gain them, thus exchanging time for goods, any taking of these things without due process of law is a threat to the life you have already created for yourself.  And when due process intrudes further than conscience allows, then the people have the right of self-defense of their lives in whole.

As a basis for foreign policy by a Tea Party these cannot be seen as 'window dressing' by a government.  A government cannot have a right to keep and bear arms and then require so many things to be done that, effectively, no one may be armed.   Civil government cannot abolish the positive Natural Liberty of warfare or the Natural Right to self-defense via arms.  All arms are included in this, and as those who break the law see no compunction about following arms restrictions, the people must be able to counter such threats by similar civil arms.  Similarly having freedom of speech but having that right so circumscribed by government to quash petitioning of government or to even allow freedom of civil assembly is not supporting the freedom of individual speech, assembly or petition of government.

Minimal government requires maximal individual liberty and the exercise thereof.  This is not, exactly, a Libertarian view as libertarians elected to office have seen fit to pack in their own ideas of personal liberty that require such things as grades going to a college student and not to their parents.  That intrudes on contractual agreements within a family and should be something that Libertarians uphold as a Natural source of contracting.  And yet that is not the case.  From that a minimalist view of government requires that government get out of the support of going to college completely and lower the burden of government to all of the people and let individuals see if they can actually afford the burden of further education.  Thus Libertarians can be caught in the idea of government doing 'good things' from their perspective, while Tea Partiers will take a view of government as a Punisher and that giving it the carrot and the stick is the recipe for tyranny.

Foreign policy wise this then puts requirements on those who would befriend the US to off-load as much of the overburden of government to the people of their government to their people.  As I've said the US has been doing just the opposite from this for over a century and it has led to fiscal ruin and debt that cannot be paid and, under the current view, has no intention of EVER being paid off.  The slow-roll of bonds and modest overspending and debt passed out of the rear view mirror back in the 1970's and isn't on the horizon ANYWHERE.  Fiscal rectitude by a brother Nation is something we need to practice at home and if it is a top value, then it is something the US should be encouraging abroad.

This then gives a set of tests to a Tea Party foreign policy of which of our brother Nations we can be friendly to and which will get reciprocity from the US.  This does not mean that all of such individual Natural and Civil rights and liberties are to be maximal, this is true, but that they must able to be practiced and government recognize that it is not the purveyor of these rights and liberties but the protector of them for their people.

Free Trade was a Reagan era mantra and the practice of it to make people free just has not worked.  Mexico is, if anything, in worse straights for its people due to NAFTA than they were before it.  The massive upheavals in their economy and the direct competition with US agriculture has had large-scale effects on Mexico which has created a large set of criminal syndicates that are waging war against the citizens of Mexico.  It is a good thing that local neighborhoods and towns take up arms in their own defense in Mexico and it is a bad thing that they must break the law to do so as their government restricts the use of even bolt action rifles to its citizens.  Why do we have free trade with such a Nation?  Similarly freer and more open trade with China has seen the few there, its government officials and cronies, prosper while the people of China earn little and have internal inflation going on that their own government can't even recognize.  The people have no freedom of assembly or petition of government, and yet it gets Most Favored Nation Trade Status?  Why?

In general this outline of a foreign policy begins to break out into a tri-fold path, which is something I've looked at before, but with an ideological backing to it that can be well understood.  The outline of the path is clear, and requires that those who put forth nostrums on things like Free Trade making people freer actually demonstrate this mantra after decades of trying it.  There are negative cases to this, and as those point to a major problem with the supposition, the mantra, itself, must be put in doubt and re-examined.  The US is not the World's Policeman and, in the words of John Quincy Adams, we support freedom and liberty everywhere, but are guardians only of our own.  To that end the first goal on the military side of foreign policy, is to help bolster and deepen the self-defense capacity of friendly brother Nations.  This can be done with direct trade, yes, but can also be done by seeking to have restrictions on the use of arms repealed so that there is a greater reservoir of those who can defend their own Nation to be called upon in event of crisis.  Working together militarily comes at the END of this process, not the BEGINNING, and those Nations that recognize that their own self-interest is best served by a civil armed populace goes a long way towards demonstrating the concept that governments cannot predict when and where war will happen as the negative Natural Liberty of warfare can be reclaimed by those who go savage and use it against their fellow man to their own ends.  If governments could control this, then they are the ones liable for every act of individual, which is to say personal, warfare as they CONTROL IT.  That is not the case.

Thus:

Path I is established: foreign relations with those friendly to the US and who hold the same values for individual Liberty and Freedom are key to good relations.  From this grows fiscal rectitude, the removal of State overburden, the lowering of the accumulation of debt and the outlook that debts cannot be contracted for at high levels ad infinitum.  These are the Nations that deserve free trade: they are friendly, they support the rights and liberties of their people including the freedom from government, and seek to foster a fiscal climate at the large scale that allows greater freedom and liberty at the small scale.

Path II comes from those Nations not on Path I but who are not hostile in word or deed towards the US.  These are Nations to which we cannot afford allegiance and from that trade with them can be burdened.  A 10% tariff, which is to say a 10% payment of the value of goods to be imported by those seeking to sell them in the US, is paying the freight to support a government which fosters trade amongst Nations.  Want to get that lowered or removed?  Become friendlier to the US and begin upholding the values necessary for Path I.  This is something that can be tuned by Congress and by giving a framework as to why it is imposed it also puts a value on being able to support such individual liberties and freedoms to those who don't support them in full or who are not friendly nor unfriendly to the US.  The middle of the road is a perfectly safe place to be, don't expect the US to help you, however, unless you start to move towards Path I.

Path III is what is left.  Nations hostile to the US in word and deed, who have shown themselves to be untrustworthy in treaties and who seek to put their own people under tyrannical rule.  We don't trade with these Nations.  Indeed, part of that 10% tariff should go towards support of the military so that we are well armed AGAINST them.  If they give safe harbor to terrorists, pirates or any other form of Private War, then they are an enemy not just of this Nation but to the order between all Nations as they do not seek to act in ways compatible to civilized life.  We do not have to be antagonistic towards these Nations, no.  We do need to be well armed against them.  On the tit-for-tat scale they wish to live and so that is all they do understand, and we can only respond in ways that befits a civilized Nation in the brotherhood of Nations.  Sanctions are one thing.  Quarantine another.  Translating our works that describe our traditions and how man is the source of all power of government and then getting them to the people of those Nations hostile to us, is a third way.  There are others, of course, but the scope of what can be done is held in by civilized restraint and by holding the civil sword well honed and practiced with.

This outgrowth of a tripartite set of paths within foreign policy would be a direct outgrowth of the ideals held by Tea Partiers.  Ideology drives policy, not the other way around as is the case in the modern world that slips into tyrannical ends for government.  Moreover it is a set of principles that are well understood internationally and are easy to remember, as anyone can remember: Friends, Neutrals, Enemies.  That is the path of Law of Nations amongst all Nations in all Eras in all places on Earth without regard to race, ethnicity, culture or any other thing.  It was practiced by the Ancient Mayans like this, and so did the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Egyptians act like this.  International law is only a set of contracts between brother Nations that is built up and each holds the others to account for signing onto the contract we call treaties.  Nations can leave treaties, as well, and have that full right and responsibility to do so so as to safeguard their own people.  That is upheld via this tri-fold Path system and in particular it points out who those seeking to bring down the civil, international agreements between Nations are and points them out for all to see.

As a policy system it allows large amounts of work and fine tuning for individual cases, and yet the touchstones are clear and abundant, so that easy to pass milestones in improving the civil rights of citizens leads to better trade and more robust interaction, and improved self-defense.  Reaganites should understand such a systems as should Libertarians as it puts individual rights and liberties in a civil context into a foreign policy system that then seeks to uphold them for all mankind while securing them abundantly at home.

Of course this means the home-side dovetail of actually removing the burdens to civil exercise of rights that have been put in place for the last century and more, at home.  This is leading by example.

An Exemplar Nation.

Showing the Way.

A Shining City on a Hill.

We need some good neighbors.

And we need to clean up our act at home to get them, first.

Form and function

Following the class on Early Modern England of the Tudor and Stewart from Yale online HIST 251: Early Modern England which covers the time period of the late 16th century to the early 18th century and is presented by Professor Keith E. Wrightson offers a look at the problems of the mid- to late-16th century, the time covering Henry VIII, Edward VI, Jane Gray, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I.  This period saw an increase in the population of England, which had been stable since at least the 13th or 14th century.  The records are not good but sizes of villages, towns and cities indicate that coming into the 16th century there were between 2.2 and 2.4 million people in England and by the end of the century that had grown to 3.1 to 3.3 million people.  There was no great advance in public sanitation, medicine or improvement in diet or climate that can be pointed to for this phenomena.  It is possible that the closing of the Monestaries and Nunneries by Henry VIII contributed to this (approx. 25 to 28% of society had been involved with the Church prior to this) which may influence the number of marriages and children being born.  That would be a contributing factor but unlikely to be the driving one.

What happened due to this is classical economic: productivity didn't increase, the land still produced only so much in the way of crops and trade could not increase significantly to off-set shortfalls in food.  Thus with more people and more demand for all goods and limited production basis for goods to be sold and traded, prices rose.  With that poverty increased and a stable work system from the prior century, where individuals worked within 20 miles of where they were born, began to break up.  It was seen, at the time, as a moral problem and that by putting the Crown at the head of the Church of England, that this was some form of moral lack which was being visited upon the Nation as a whole.  That moral view of poverty is one that understood that there were different types of poor.

First there were those who were poor by circumstances.  Widows and those that fell gravely ill and could not work fell into this category.  These people were poor through no fault of their own and it was a moral duty to care for such individuals by families and through charity both through the Church and by civic means through holding special Ales and meals so that the poor could be cared for.  These poor will always be with us: the poor of circumstance.

Second are those who are poor because they lack will to work.  These poor could do something about their problems and deserved perhaps a bit of a charitable hand up at a civil level to at least pay their keep until they could get regular work.  Continuing not to work, after that, was a moral lack of the individual involved.

Those without work in that era faced an economy that would have to expand to employ more people, yet that was not happening.  Thus the poor who lacked work and actively searched for it meant that the old system of working jobs in and around where one was born began to erode, and there were soon people wandering far outside their local environs in the search of work.

In modern times we have added an additional category that has two aspects to this: the cyclical poor.

Cyclical poverty was something seen by those migrant laborers who moved from job to job seasonally, usually with harvest or catch at fisheries.  These individuals were not poor by circumstance or moral character, but by job type and this required different strategies of saving and planning one's life.

The other aspect of this is the rags to riches to rags or shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves phenomena where someone may start poor and find a way to 'make good' then spend their wealth until they are poor again.  This can take generations or it can be with just one individual in a single lifetime.

The forms of poverty in the Early Modern period of England meant hardship, hunger and often rootless wandering in search of work and being able to find a spouse and create a household as I went over in a prior post on this.  Without enough work to sustain a larger family basis and without enough positions available to allow enough work for those willing to do it the economy shifted in ways unknown to prior generations.  The hardship on the poor had effects on the Yeoman and Gentry classes which utilized the necessity for implementing higher land use fees and custom, shortened lease terms and then used funds to buy up lands that the Crown made available as it sold of prior Church land to fund overseas adventures.  The amount of land necessary to rise into the landed Gentry class expanded and number of Yeomen became minor Gentry via consolidating land holdings.

Elizabeth I when she came to power had seen the effects of these changes and took some pages from prior Monarchs in England who had to quell problems in the land that were problematical to the Nation.  Straight out of Henry I she took the idea of revaluing the coinage, which meant that there would be a stable currency with a value that everyone understood.  This is no minor feat during inflationary cycles when the suspicion of adulterated or shaved coinage means the currency value is not respected.  She also took advice to implement the first patent system so that inventors of devices would have a limited term of being sole producers so that some new forms of work could come about to employ more people to the profit of the inventor.  Within the Mercantile Capitalist system this would mean that competition could take place on ingenuity and such law would foster advancement of new ways of doing business to increase the number of people employed in new endeavors.  And for those without enough money to actually invest in creating something new she also put forward a grant system wherein those with good ideas could come to the Crown, outline them and seek to get a minor grant to start up their venture. 

Finally, to deal with foreign affairs, particularly the wars and support for Catholic monarchs by Spain, she had to modernize the Navy while, at the same time, downsizing its utilization of resources which led to lighter, faster and deadlier ships that were hard to target and yet packed a punch above their normal weight class.  There would be some foreign expeditions, yes, and they would be ones that would not have an extremely high overhead and would seek to further support for Protestantism and require Spain to expend resources at a distance which is always a high cost affair.

Of the things that most attracted the Vikings to England during the time of the Danelaw, then under Canute and later under William the Conqueror was that the English people were enormously productive beyond their numbers.  For a period of time between the 7th and 9th century the city of York was the second largest city in Europe, right after Constantinople, which is no mean feat.  Canute left England alone as its vast prosperity was something he did not want to disturb, and he generally left areas under his control to local rule and imposed only a new leadership when it was necessary to assure fealty to him.  Elizabeth I is such a compelling figure in so many ways, perhaps the most intelligent of all the Monarchs of England or at least since Henry I, that it is easy to overlook her understanding of the role of the Monarch in the economy of the Nation as a whole.  She is so appreciated for her enigmatic stances on religion, both re-instituting a Protestant form of Christianity but keeping many of the trappings and forms of Roman Catholicism, that her deep and abiding trust in her own people is often overlooked in the realm of economics.

What she did was to bolster the ability of individuals to be prosperous by their own hand and only put forth limited funds (as they were limited after all the trials and tribulations from the time of her father's divorce to her accession to the throne) to reinforce the economy and shift the Navy from a relatively high overhead affair to one of somewhat lesser overhead.  The Crown could not make the realm prosperous and Elizabeth I put her trust in the people of England to work through inflationary times and use the support she instituted to become far more prosperous which would mean more jobs and productivity for the entire economy.  Before the era of economics she put forth a basic understanding that an economy flows up from its people, not down from the Crown, which was a hard thing to think of coming after the Late Medieval Period.  Plus by taking these measures she would shift the moral case away from the Crown and back to the people, so that they could figure out the best and most moral way to deal with their concerns.

Her wisdom on these matters elude many modern economists who take a very primitive and class oriented view of a Nation and do not understand that a government can only foster prosperity, not institute it.  If her government lacked funds for many things, which it did, by concentrating on the basics of defending the Nation, ensuring the value of the currency, and allowing people to utilize their ingenuity to create businesses and jobs, were in many ways extraordinary and show a keen insight into the basis of a Nation's economy which the majority of modern or modernistic politicians seem unable to grasp.  Her father had, in effect, redistributed the wealth of the Church to fund his Crown ventures and the result was inflation and a slow disintegration of a stable way of life.  With the money spent, the land in the hands of the Gentry and Yeomanry, the Crown could not spend as it did under Henry VIII and, instead, had to find a new way to do much with very little.  In doing this Elizabeth I draws us in on this level as well and demonstrates what an extraordinary woman and Queen she was who placed her faith not in government but in the people of England.  She figured she could handle the government on her own and beguile it and later generations no end, which she accomplished.

We could learn much of how a government that keeps to its knitting and lets the people be free to innovate and protects such innovation for limited duration can help change the economic aspects of the people and the Nation to the benefit of all.  Sadly such advanced learning is overlooked in a more primitive redistribution of wealth and an impoverishing of all to the benefit of the very, very few.  For so much supposed learning of the current crop of Elites, they sure aren't that advanced in their thinking.

Morals and Ethics, Health Care and Government

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

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

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

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

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

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

ajacksonian on November 29, 2013 at 10:18 AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ideology to Eschatology

Ideology

Source: WordNet (r) 1.7

ideology
     n 1: an orientation that characterizes the thinking of a group or nation [syn: political orientation, political theory]
     2: imaginary or visionary theorization

Eschatology

Source: WordNet (r) 1.7

eschatology
     n : the branch of theology that is concerned with such final things as death and judgment; heaven and hell; the end of the world

The modern day Left started with an ideological framework that arose out of the works of Karl Marx and then added to via the International meetings on Marxism and then put through the lenses of Progressivism, Soviet Communism, socialists like Friedrich Engels who had impact on US Socialism via his works with Marx, European Anarcho-Syndicalist movements, the works of Antonio Gramsci and cultural hegemony as seen in the Frankfort School of cultural Marxism, then onto National Socialism and Nazi Fascism.  Taken as a whole, starting with Marx, the ideology derived from this school of thought is one that is based on an end of economic systems and the final removal of the capitalist or owning class of society and the rule of the Proletariat.  As an ideology it has its roots in the post-Classical period coming after John Locke, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant, and as a form of response to Utilitarianism.

I have gone over the ground of Marxism multiple times, most recently in What is the value of... anything? and review some of the highlights and problems of Marxism from the time of Marx.  Economically Marxism's problems with defining value, exactly who is being exploited, explaining what alienation of labor is and why its abolition is seen as a historical imperative does not address a part of Marxism that keeps it alive, and that is its sociology.  Within the Old Left (Communists, National Socialists, Anarcho-Syndicalists, American Progressivists) there was a requirement of scholarship for those on the 'inside' of the movements.  You had to know Marx and Engels, at the very least, be able to go through the rhetoric of Marxism via Hegel's Dialectical Materialism and then continue on with how bad those owning businesses were in their exploitation of labor.  Even given misplaced basis for arguments, there had to be a rational structure of argumentation on those points and defense of the critical starting points to assert the end points of the ideology.

This formed a sociological structure within Marxists circles that I got to witness first hand growing up in a family of socialist sympathizers.  It was an old First International sort of adherence, however, and had nothing to do with the Second or Third Congresses dominated by the (so-called as they put it) Communists.  Thus the first divisions were International Congress divisions and they would break out to the 'true believers, the rest of you are wrong' First Congress types and then those seen as corrupt: Communists (Soviet sort), National Socialists (all stripes), Progressives, social hegemonists... basically anyone save the strongly influenced Anarch-Syndicalists who cribbed a lot from US First International followers who themselves cribbed from Engels.  As you can tell by the long list of Marxist derivatives, there was a lot of in-fighting, factionalism and otherwise fierce boundary disputes within Marxists circles based on who you followed and what their form of argumentation was.  This could get broken down inside factions via different argument strains and who followed which form of their own particular brand of Marxism.

What this strongly looks like is a religious movement, and that is due to the fact that human nature (which Marx criticized the Utilitarians for not understanding) is seen as something that will go through a sudden, global transformation amongst the Proletariat.  Basically from nowhere, although the Marxists will point to the evils of capitalist exploitation, etc. but the actual gripes that the actual proletarians had (versus the idealized ones of the Marxists) had more to do with banal things like pay, working conditions, bad bosses and then, lo and behold, abusive Union bosses.  Labor Unions, seen as a first step towards Socialism and this grand uplifting of proletarian thought, turned out to be just another human made and manned system with all the faults of all such systems that man makes.  Instead of uplifting worker education they served to line the pockets of Union Bosses with worker funds and then walk away richer for it and cut deals with the very people they were supposed to protect the workers from.  The First Congress types saw Trade Unions as just another corrupt system and lumped them in the 'everybody else' category of 'not true socialists' right next to the National Socialists.

A strange thing happened from the days of the Old Marxist Left (roughly up to the mid-1970's encompassing the 'New Left' which was just warmed-over Old Left) and today: the grandiose vision of Marx was retained but the rhetoric, the internal logic, the ability to argue based on it all disappeared.  Lock, stock and barrel the current Authoritarian Left no longer has intellectual roots in Marx, Marxism or even logic.  Meet up with a Leftists today and they couldn't even attempt to give a good description of the Labor Theory of Value or to even explain what Alienation of Labor is.  Handwave as much as you like at the Frankfurt School, but they sought a domination through culture and have, instead, reinvented nihilism.

Nihilism

Source: WordNet (r) 1.7

nihilism
     n 1: a revolutionary doctrine that advocates destruction of the social system for its own sake
     2: the delusion that things (or everything, including the self) do not exist; a sense that everything is unreal [syn: nihilistic delusion]
     3: complete denial of all established authority and institutions

Given that Marx gave us an Eschatology of end-times, it is little wonder that those seeking a cultural domination would come up with nihilism.  Trying to unmoor past and present, seek to remove objective reasoning and, instead, personalize all political and economic points of view and then enforce those on everyone from some intellectual elite that doesn't have rational thinking as its basis, is it any wonder that you come to nihilism?

The feel-good and warm-fuzzies of Marxism are retained, that workers paradise and everyone getting goodies for nothing and their chicks for free remains to this day the heart of the Left and, in fact, dominates it.  If the Frankfurt School is to blame for its institutional marching to the point where politicians no longer believe in balancing a check book for THEMSELVES not to speak of the governments they seek to run, is it any wonder the rest of us are left scratching our heads asking: just how the hell is THIS supposed to work?

If there is no inherent difference between work and non-work, then why work?

If you hand out a dole to everyone for just existing, then who grows the food and why?  To what end?

Being generous with tax revenue and then some, means that you are taking economic vitality and encouraging non-vitality and asking our children to pay for it.  And if you don't teach them the value of actually earning a living, and they don't repay the debts, then who is going to grow the food?

Mao had the lovely idea of whipping the intellectuals into line, even a good amount of his supporters, by putting them to grow food for others and starve as they did so.  Radical material simplification, as one professor puts it about the Dark Ages: you are poor, hungry and have a short life deprived of the benefits of a civilization that once flourished.

Marxism has always had an eschatological view of the human race: it was always an end time religion because it never got the basics of human nature right and assumed a massive change intellectually that would free the working class and remove alienation of labor.  That's right, everyone would get to do the entire job for themselves!  You would be a fisher, raise wheat and corn, have chickens, read and print books, go hunting, and have the satisfaction of knowing that your labor was no longer alienated!

Unfortunately fishing is not catching.

Unfortunately hunting is not always successful.

Unfortunately chickens get sick, as do pigs, cattle, and you have to care for them as well as yourself.

To keep warm you must chop your own wood, mine your own coal or make your own nuclear reactor.

And then you would have to find the time to write about how grand your life was and how good it was to have unalienated labor.

Because all of it, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, you are going to do it all and even when you do it with your fellow liberated proletarians, you dare NOT divide up labor into different parts because that will alienate your labor from the entire affair.

To support unalienated labor is impossible, but the Left has decided to support the unemployed who should be seeking a job but now get supported for nearly two years and are taught how to live off the money taken by government for them.  Their labor is lacking.  Your labor's wages are stolen via government and given to those who have decided that living on what government gives them from you is better than working for a living and supporting themselves.  This isn't labor that is no longer alienated as their labor is no longer done: that which is not done cannot be alienated as it is never present.

What drives this is no longer an ideology but the belief in the end state of an ideology: the ideology, itself, is no longer discussed or thought about as a thing in and of itself.  At this point there is a belief in Marx that is no longer intellectual and not even rooted in his texts or the body of work of those closely associated with him.  Leftists are atheists because they want to be in the belief that Marx is right, not through reading Marx and understanding Marx, but just believing in him.  Their attacks on those who read religious texts is thus an anti-intellectual attack, no matter how dressed up and how many degrees are held by those going after religion, their own belief structure is based on unread texts and only on assumptions.

The devolution of Marxism from rhetorical premise and argumentative structure that requires thought has been slow, but has become greatly accelerated as the 'March through the institutions' is no longer based on something that has definition, but on the belief that the end result is 'good'.  Yet what is 'good' is never defined in a hard, fast and discernable way: good has no end state to it of limits to how much good any bureaucratic organization can do.  In fact the growth of bureaucracy is an in-bred 'good' in the belief that more of it and more power to it will get 'good' results.  And because human nature is no longer studied, nor the very impacts of it upon prior Marxist ideology and its factionation, it is not understood that a bureaucracy has no intellect, has no fast goal, cannot become an 'expert' no matter how many it hires, and that the Iron Law of bureaucracy is that those that further the ends of the bureaucracy get rewarded as the bureaucracy expands.  Thus the end goal a bureaucracy, any bureaucracy, is the expansion of bureaucracy by the bureaucracy for the bureaucracy.  Other goals become secondary to that quest for greater power.

Marxist ideology is not, of necessity, nihilistic and was, in fact, seen as something a bit more humanized than Utilitarianism.  Yet the very problems of Utilitarianism are seen in Marxism in its later stages of demeaning the individual, of not understanding the human nature of the individual and not addressing that there is more to the individual than, in the case of Marx, labor not utility.  Yet the very way labor is posited makes it utilitarian, thus the premise of Marx is eschatology within an ideology based on a belief and criticism that is has scant difference from the ones Marx leveled at Utilitarianism.

This cannot be argued to those who follow only the nihilistic eschatology of modern Marxism/Leftism because those inside the belief system don't bother to read and grapple with Marx.  It is always about doing 'good' through government, growing government and never asking if this is good for all the individuals in society.  Yet they speak of the 'collective' but then only want to do better for parts of it, not the whole thing, and thus they even miscomprehend what collectivism is and sacrifice it on the alter of special preferences. 

I never thought I would wish for the day of actual, intellectual Marxists arguing the rhetoric of Marx for policy, but they are not to be found.  The Marxism in the halls of power today, under a Progressivist/Liberal/Left guise is one that is rudely divorced from the ideology of Marx and connected to the end state eschatology of Marx.  Even that doesn't follow Marx as they screw up the Marxist notion of collectivism and replace it with special privileges for a few.  That is a National Socialist conception from Fascism as gone through the form of its German descendent, and this one isn't the one at Frankfurt but the one that got tried at Nuremburg.  It, too, had an end state eschatology that it elevated above ideology, and it was hard to find parsers of Marx amongst the National Socialists who started out as off-shoots of the International Socialist schools.  Gramsci would have his ideas picked up the the West but his body would be killed by Italian Fascists, which demonstrates the allure of special privilege nihilistic eschatology based roughly on Marx.

Too bad those followers of this anti-human form of Marxism don't bother to read history, either, because it is littered with such examples and death tolls attributable to it.  Better to go on pushing 'forward' never looking at where the path gets you and never asking 'just where in the hell are we going?'  The moment you do that you are decried as being against this or that special privileged group, or as someone who is an anarchist, which is strange because that is just another nihilistic eschatology.  Thus point out the bad ends of the road and you are said to be using a nihilistic eschatology by those who are using a nihilistic eschatology and don't want it mentioned that this is what they are doing.  And if you ask where they get these ideas from they just say its because it 'feels good' to do these things and have government do it for them with other people's money.

Lately, though, they are finding out they have to pay for their good ideas by finding out that their health insurance policy has been canceled and that they will have to get a much more costly one that does less for them.  Only once they start to get mugged by their own creation do they realize that there is pain involved to the many for the few with their 'good feeling' policies.  Better that it be a lot of pain, swiftly and deep today, so that more will see this is not good at all so that we can start requiring that people think and work for themselves and help the collective to get out of the mess the privileged got us into with their strange religion based only on good feelings and an nihilistic eschatology.  Ideologues you can at least argue with on the basis of something.  Those with a worldview religion based on someone they never read have belief in nothing and no idea what they are actually arguing about, just that they are always right.  Religious zealots who are unlearned and don't bother to ever think about what they say, you only can argue with and never, ever get anywhere.  I'll take the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mormons, or any other religious sect that at least honestly reads about itself than this strange sect on the Left that just believes it is right because it said so.

Congressional software design

The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was a piece of legislation that did far more than just try to transform the medical care and delivery sector of the economy and also brought in such things as Student Loans under its heading in a separate section of the bill.  Be that as it may the bulk of the bill dealt with a series of mandates and payments to government (taxes and penalties), and within those the requirement of health insurance companies to provide certain types of care for 'free', plus hand out individual 'subsidies' meant that there had to be a large-scale interplay between private insurers and the public purse.  To facilitate that a series of 'exchanges' were to be set up either by the State governments or, if they opted out of Obamacare, the federal government.  Thus there are a whole list of exceptions, exemptions, requirements and so forth that differ per State that the entire system must provide for, and these vary from State to State, as well.

In the previous part of my life before ill-health befell me, I worked for the federal government on the DoD civil side for an Agency that had some actual things to produce for the military.  As I was technically astute and able to deal with large scale bureaucracies (my prior university experience gave me that) I was able to shift from production work, which I enjoyed, to process improvement (or one of its synonymous variations over time) and then to new system procurement.  Thus I got to learn the government side of contracting, specifications and requirements: the whole series of hoops to go through to show that what you wanted would work, it had a set cost and it would have a series of set functions while interacting with previous work systems.  This required a whole set of understanding from the system level architecture to data file types and their metadata, library storage of digital work, shifting work from physical media to digital media and back again...plus all the network architecture for a closed system, software specifications to do particular types of work, and the equipment that would be required to proof and make press ready printing plates.  I became a one-man band of specialists and held a number of specialist hats for the agency as well as the Contracting Officer Technical Representative (COTR) hat for the project.

In that era of the late 1990's the federal government was shifting from the old procurement systems of detailed specifications and looking to utilize Commercial Off The Shelf technology (COTS) and go from a 'low bidder always wins' to 'best value can win' paradigm.  That last meant that if a contractor actually exceeded minimum specifications and offered more value for the dollar than the lowest bidder, it was possible to seek a change in funding levels with a justification for it.  I got to experience that and a firm from the old 'sole source' days trying to leverage its contacts to win with a lowball and then up the price through a series of Request For Changes (RFCs).  In contracting parlance the RFC can start to add to the cost of the contract if accepted by both sides, although either side can propose one.  The US Navy is infamous for their massive cost over-runs due to the number of RFCs on ship construction... luckily I was working on a simple IT project, but knew the RFC dance from my time in the agency.

For a contract Request For Proposal I had a tight set of specifications, workstation requirements, networking requirements, library storage system requirements, software requirements... an entire system specified for with minimal performance levels to it.  That went about 20% over on final award, but we got way more for that money in the way of reliability and software backing than the lowball bidder could ever provide.  I had spent years working with everyone from every system that would be impacted by this project not just the output groups but those on the input and library storage realm, as well as making the system Continuation Of Operations Plan compliant in case any single site were totally destroyed, so that we could at least get data to a printer with digital systems and get product.

Because I had been through the process improvement dances by attending seminars and inter-governmental meetings and just reading a lot on the subject, I was fluent on things like the Mythical Man-Month and the concept of a Death March development project.  In prior times my agency had a large scale project that suffered from the mythical man-month problem of program management, and it was a Death March as well: it was an IT system specified for in the 1980's, getting first deliverables in the mid-1990's and had a Y2K bug that would kill it.  Some items were delivered mere weeks before Y2K.

When you are specifying for how many people you need to do a project you do it in man hours or man months (or man years depending on the scale of it).  It is a generalized way of estimating how many people you need to do tasks on a project and useful for scaling personnel for a project or program.  So many people to work so many hours on X task gets you so man man hours.  Burden that by 20% and you get a realistic ballpark figure of how many actual people you need.  The burdening is to add in such things as sick time, unexpected delays, bureaucracy, etc.  Unfortunately when you have a project that has had only a few people on it and it is behind on its schedule, you start to try and throw more people at the problem.  These people are not up to speed on the project, may not know all the work that has gone on, and may or may not have the necessary skill sets to do the work.  As a program manager you need those man hours or man months of work in, however, and when you are late you do throw people at the project to burn those man hours up.  What happens, however, is that the delays get longer as the new people do take time to get familiarized with the system and when they make mistakes they have to be caught and then work re-done.  The less familiar people are with the project the more likely they are to commit mistakes which actually begins to set meeting the deadline further back.  Of course to avoid that you add more people to the project!

Ed Yourdon who wrote the Death March book (I read it in 1st edition back in the day) followed through on this mentality to see how modern program managers dealt with the problems of the mythical man-month.  Mostly they hadn't.  But a new phenomena had cropped up and it wasn't just in the Info. Tech. world, either, and that was the problem of changing customer specifications and unrealistic milestone schedules.  A death march project suffers from poor specifications for a system from the start and I read books to try and deal with just that problem as part of my job, too.  With poor specifications and milestone schedules what happens is that a project gets started with one set of specifications that then get changed in whole or in part, and prior work which was accepted now no longer advances the program to its milestones and must be abandoned.  On the IT side, however, some of that is in software code modules which may still have absolutely valid functions to help meet the schedule, so that software is kept for those functions.  New software is build around it for other functions but, when debugging must occur, problems can crop up between that older module and newer work if all the data structures haven't been well defined: old code may start to work on other parts of data passed to it due to the way it was sent to the module.  Even worse there may be dependencies in the module for information from other modules which weren't developed and that will hang up the entire development for that function to de-conflict these problems.  This eats up time.  It can invite the mythical man-month problem, and does, but also has feedback to the customer as the code structure may now need to be changed based on the newer specifications so as to avoid older software.  In theory you want to just rebuild modules from scratch, but as they have already been accepted you are stuck with them as a developer. Plus de novo work costs more, which wasn't budgeted for.

In a death march a project has a moving set of specification goal posts and the mythical man-month personnel problem plays into the problem as individuals begin to identify the project as one that actually can't reach its goals.  Yet because the customer wants results and money is available the project continues and begins a process of cycling through people within it, so that the people who started the death march project may be gone within a few months as the first set of changes come in and they see either a program manager unable to get the idea of hard set specifications or a customer unwilling to provide them.  Because money flows the project continues, and the personnel begin to flow as well so that the second group have not just the mythical man-month problem of not knowing the project fully, but also have already completed code that may not be well documented to deal with.  Without impeccable program documentation both outside and inside the computer code, new personnel face the daunting task of having to deal with changed functions and not fully understanding what has been done before them.  Of course the first set of changes brings problems and may break prior functions, thus requiring code rework... fine and dandy if it ended there, but a death march will see requirements and functions change yet again due to changes in management, possibly, or changes in customer specifications and requirements as they process through what the prior set of changes actually are.  The morale of a death march project is abysmal, and yet it happens often enough to have its own set of criteria adorning it and its own category of failure.

Obamacare came in with Congress setting some pretty broad but ill-conceived specifications for what would be a software project.  Plus there are hard legal deadlines set by Congress that met political realities but have no real parallel for a large scale software project.  In other words the federal customer shopped around a project with ill-defined goals and expectations and an unknown number of variables for which organizations and systems it would have to interact with.  Each State that didn't want to do an 'exchange' then changed the federal system as it must cover that State with all of its legal requirements, as well, which generate up new system requirements and interactions with previously designed code.  The number of States that refused was high, when it was expected to be only a couple of States, and that meant more had to be picked up by the federal system.  Yet that system now had to interact with insurance groups in different States each having their own data requirements.

The SCOTUS decision also gave States leeway on other parts of the law which also affected the 'exchanges' and because States took different routes on that, each of them that went away from the original template then brought with it changes to the system.

What Congress created was an ever changing set of functional variables within the system that would not allow the overall interaction to be a known quantity until a date perhaps as little as six months and no more than a year before the deliverable was required, by statute, to be in place.  In the modern age such laws that have so many parts to them become, effectively, IT projects.  They are designed by a committee.  They are carried out by an entirely different branch of government that must deal with its complexities, and yet the activation date is set to political realities not actual realities of software design and roll-out.  This latter problem is one that is well known: large scale systems fail more often than they succeed in all realms of business and government.

By not taking these realities into account the law is bad law, and is worse as a software design and integration project.  Any complex system requiring interactions between a set of knowns (federal agencies) has problems within the federal government.  The FBI tried twice in the 1990's to create a single sign on system for its agents to get access to all the databases the agency held.  It failed both times because the systems each had their own data standards, hardware and software, and some had human interaction requirements because they were never dreamt of being fully automated in the first place.  DoD attempted to revamp its pay system in the '90s, as well, and failed to replace multiple separate pay and leave systems with a single, unified one.  Another part of the DoD attempted a large scale system roll out for gathering map data and the RFC database became nearly as large as the project, itself.  And any ship the Navy has built for it will have a huge file behind it of changes done with a frequency that is mindboggling.  The federal government has problems within each of its departments and agencies, and working across them in an automated way is problematical due to the complexity of existing IT infrastructure.  When the States, private insurance companies and all the individuals in the US are added to this, along with federal and State laws that are at variance for each State, is it any wonder that this system is failing like we see it failing today?

Each of the three branches of the federal government has changed the specifications for the system: the legislative by the law itself, the executive in trying to prioritize functions, and the judicial by changing the interpretation of the law in a way unknown from all prior rulings.  Each of these entities can change the parameters, functions and deliverables of the system in an instant.  And yet the already accepted code is just that: accepted.  It is there be it functional, semi-functional or zombie waiting for some errant function to bring it back to life once more.  It is the far-reaching scope of the law that is a failure because no federal entity can deal with so much complexity.  The software is on a death march because of the inability of any of the three branches of the federal government to grasp that they are writing deliverable code requirements with variable function parameters.  Yet even if this was done by hand on paper it wouldn't work because of the rate of change to parameters of each part of the system: State, three branches of federal, insurance systems and advances in medical technology shifting the entire basis for treatments and medications.

That last is at peril with Obamacare as it puts a high price on new treatments and attempts to create a static system to deal with what already exists in the way of medicine.  Yet, with the entire genome now available for study, we are getting some of the first treatments to long-standing diseases which have the opportunity to alter what we see as medicine and health care.  You and I can adapt to that quite readily.  A large, hide-bound bureaucracy with hard coded imperatives and functions in its software will not.  Our freedom and liberty make it possible to change the entire idea of what health care actually is, and the idea of 'insurance' may get replaced by other systems of delivering health care that have little to do with doctors or pharmacies, and yet costs less and is more widely  distributed.  We are heading into an era of miniaturized labs on a chip that can do more complete work than an actual lab employing tens or hundreds of people per lab.  Similarly with stem cells that can come from each individual and be differentiated to organ based cells, these cells can be printed into a 3D matrix to be put into the body without fears of rejection factors.  Telemedicine and automated systems for analysis aren't just on the horizon with the former being here for nearly a decade and the latter now available interactively via web sites.  Incorporate these with labs on a chip and miniaturized sensors and you have something very close to Larry Niven's Autodoc: a machine capable of doing a complete bio-analysis of an individual to find systemic problems and even treat certain conditions, as well as do simple things like set bones, and call on specialized individuals or emergency personnel. 

Just take a look at the last century of medicine and compress the number of changes coming down to half or one-quarter of that time.  What sort of fit is a One Size Fits All Fits None Well system of paying for health care for what is coming?

Government furlough

So the US government is down to essential personnel only, today.

Note the sky has not fallen.

Note, also, that the Earth continues to spin on its axis and revolve around the sun.

The Nation has not fallen into chaos.

I've been through this in the Clinton ear and was considered 'essential personnel' back in the day.  Which meant I had to go to work for warfighter support.

Who else had to go to work?

Guards, you need guards and the security people.

The people in the boiler room and HVAC, yeah you needed them, too.

Our office manager, although without secretary, which is the first time I actually got to see anyone in management actually have to do, you know, work.  Type their own letters. Get the office mail (what there was of it). Track secure packages.  Sign off on work product.  That sort of thing.

There was someone at the mail room but that is because the loading dock had to be open, and their boss covered the mail room, as well.  The mail room staff, you know the people who package and sort stuff, they weren't there and you had to DIY packaging for any outgoing packages.

Who wasn't there?  Whole cadres of mid-level and upper-level managers, the GS-13 through GS-15 types, save for one GS-15 per Directorate.  The rest?  Gone.  Lights off.

Cafeteria workers were not there.

Nor was the EEO staff.

Or any of the Human Resources staff, except their boss.

Janitorial crew was skeleton, enough to clean the washrooms and any other messes that showed up.

Grounds people were missing.

And anyone who didn't have work product headed to the warfighter, they were not there.

Basically the building I was in was mostly empty save for the rooms dedicated to actually getting stuff made to go out the door, and people to take it out the door to couriers.

I have a suggestion for a CR.

Make it an 'essential staff only' CR and put it in for a few months until everyone can get settled down to trying to figure out what is and isn't needed any more.

The debt will get maintenance payments.

The military will be on duty.

SSA and M&M checks will get processed.

As the Interstates are actually a military requirement during the Cold War, they can get to do repair work on it... give the USACE something to do beyond pork spending.

The border will have people manning it.

USPTO will be open.

USPS too, come to that, as well as USGS, or at least those parts actually making maps and charts.

A few other select places covered by the US Constitution would be open.

It's interesting that while Ambassadors are mentioned in the Constitution, a State Dept. isn't.  Maybe we can get the military to run the rest of it?

Everything else?

Do that for long enough and it becomes the 'new normal'.

Six to eight months ought to do it, and then the GAO which will be open on skeletal staff, can start to shut down buildings and auction off equipment... and then the buildings themselves...

And if President Obama wants to do it his way or the highway on the debt ceiling, then he should be thanked for wanting to run a government on $2.5 trillion/year and not on $4 trillion a year!  Tell him that he will be admired for his fiscal astuteness that the government should only spend what it takes in and that a skeleton 'essential personnel only' government is a good start on that process.

Always give an enemy what they want in a way they will not like and will look duplicitous in refusing.

Works every time.

Thin Red Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where are they?

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

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

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

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

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

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

A final thought.

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

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

Yet another of the 50 Shades of Maroon.

Nope, 50 is just not enough, methinks.

Passively implicit

When looking at the US Constitution I take a view of it as a structuralist, that is to say that the form of government is given as a structure that has a number of interlocking parts that are defined, limited and created to serve a purpose.  Structural analysis means that you take the words as they are presented in the context of the English language.  I laid this out in Structural analysis of Amendment II, and that rests on the work that I looked at earlier by Nicholas Rosencranz who laid out how the sentence structure of the English language creates the structure of government in the Subjects and Objects of the Constitution.  The lineage of the US Constitution starts with agreements outlined in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and King Alfred all the way through to Bill of Rights put in place with James II, which I went over in Roots of constitutional government.  For this article I'm going to be building off my article on Taxation via sales.

Taxation was part of the trigger for the US Revolution and it is understood that the Founders and Framers both had a view that taxation is a necessary evil to run the organ of society known as government.  As a necessary evil it must be limited so that it does not over stress the body which is society that requires the functioning of government to do the few and necessary things to allow for the individuals to be free.  With that said taxation takes many forms and the US Congress gets some particular types taxation in Art I, Sec 8, in part:

Section. 8.

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

If Congress was getting the complete taxation power with this clause then there would be no need to put in Duties, Imposts and Excises, now, would there?  In fact it took an Amendment for Congress to get the income tax, and even that Amendment has been misused as it nowhere indicates that Congress may levy different taxes on different income levels.  The Progressive Income Tax requires not just the Income Tax part, but a specific exemption of the Privileges and Immunities clause and Amendment V and Due Process of Law which is to be applied equally to all citizens.  Be that as it may, later in Sec 8 is a clause that indicates what the scope of the Taxation power actually is:

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

Duties, Imposts and Excises are generally taxes aimed at the National level and at international trade.  Thus the regulatory or regularizing power of Congress writing law in support of Treaties or, in cases where there are no trade treaties, setting the Nation's tax policy towards importation of goods to sustain trade, thus are complementary to the Duties, Imposts and Excises previously mentioned.  That is to say there is an explicit venue given for the Taxation power that is complete for Congress for international trade modified by Treaties.  Thus even where it is a complete power it is one that has limitations via Treaty.

Next is Sec 9 where one tax power is restricted and then modified by Amendment:

No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

This is the first outright restriction to the Taxation power and now limiting it.  Do note that this is a passive clause and that it does not mention Congress nor does it mention any other branch or any other government.  Thus this applies to all governments and all branches of all governments in the United States.  Remember in Sec 8 there is the language 'The Congress shall have...' is an explicit grant of power and as all of Sec 8 is a single sentence with many semi-colons, all of that is covered under that.  There is no need to repeat it per line as the separate grants are broken up for clarity's sake, for readability, and to let someone catch their breath if they had to read it as a single sentence.

In Section 9 each clause is a single, stand-alone sentence, complete in and of itself.  These sentences are not started by explicit and active restrictions upon, say, Congress, but are passive and general in nature.  The Framers were more than capable of starting a sentence 'Congress shall make no law...' but these clauses do not start with that beginning.  As the Constitution is about the organization of the United States and what the role of the States shall be, when States require separate coverage they are mentioned, as in Sec 10, and I'm coming back to Sec 9, but here is the language on Taxation in 10:

No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.

With 'No State shall...' we are given a definitive subject and then a set of Objects with modifiers.  It is this language that is absent in Sec 9 and without an actual Subject that is defined then the generalized Subject is being addressed to all levels of all governments.

Imposts and Duties on Imports or Exports is a linking of topics in Sec 10 and due to that linkage these powers are addressed to those objects.  That explicit language and linkage then gives proper definition to the prior Congressional power on Imposts and Duties: Imports and Exports.  If a State wants a special exemption it must go to Congress and that only for the necessary execution of inspection laws.  By making those funds go to the US Treasury this is seen as a federal power granted to Congress and is for Imports and Exports.

Now back in Sec 9 there is the final clause and one that clearly de-limits powers and it is this:

No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.

As with the prior prohibition this one is given a passive voice and does not state 'Congress shall make no law...' nor does it start 'No State shall...' but, instead, addresses Taxation as a whole.  This is a restriction on the Taxation power, itself.  By not having either Congress or the States as the subject, as with the previous passive and standalone clause, this clause then addresses all governments in the United States.

This is an implicit restriction on taxation of goods moved from State to State on goods exported from one State to another State.  No government may do this in the United States.

Now lets flip this around into a different arena and ask: what is the form of this restriction on an international scale?

The States of the United States are seen as Sovereign entities and actually have an escape hatch from the US Constitution embedded within it in Sec 10:

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

This language also shows up later in the Constitution in Art IV:

Section. 4.

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.

In Art IV, Sec 4 the guarantee of a Republican Form of Government is to the States, which are signatories to the US Constitution after ratification by the people of that State.  The protections against having this subverted are to protect the States against Invasion and domestic Violence.  In Art I, Sec 10 there are a set of powers that a State recovers if the United States does not support this and it is the ones they agree to set aside outside of these specific causes.  When you examine that list you get the conception of the broad headings that the States recover in full upon invasion, imminent threat of Danger or having their government threatened with being overturned via non-Republican means are broad and sweeping.  These powers are what we call the Foreign Policy power and the Military power, not just the defensive Militia power which is due to all men, but the assertive and external Military power.  Also it regains all the taxation powers and the powers to build new military fortifications and equipment to guard itself.

In International Affairs a State with the full Foreign Policy, Military and Taxation power is known as an independent Nation State: a country.

Thus the States must have these powers to set aside in this agreement known as the US Constitution, as you cannot recover what you did not have to start with.  That is simple logic.

Taking the US Constitution as a TREATY DOCUMENT and examining what the form of Taxation is we then come to a conclusion of the limitation on the Taxation power that is startling due to the understanding that is underlying it.  It is the scope and form of Treaty that many who have argued on the necessity of unburdened trade have used at the International scale and has its full form seen with an organizations of States that agree to this view so as to have a coherent Nation amongst them.

What is a trade agreement that unburdens trade amongst equals and limits the power of an oversight group so that it may not burden such trade via direct taxation?

What is a trade agreement that sets up a system whereby sellers in one State that is signatory to the Treaty cannot have its goods or services taxed by a recipient State and its citizens?

What is the form of trade agreement that abolishes duties, imposts and excises save for necessary inspection and then those funds applied only to those inspections to ensure that agreed-upon legal trade is all that is going on between States?

Why this does have a modern term, doesn't it?

This is known as a FREE TRADE AGREEMENT.

Right there, in the US Constitution, powerfully stated by not being explicit, not a direct power grant, but by restricting all the governments involved, including the agreed-upon oversight body.  It is one of the most subtle and yet powerful statements on the positive value of trade between States to knit a Union together and to allow that free men when trading with other free men in States that all fall under the Treaty shall have NO TAXATION applied to that direct sale from individual to individual, State to State.

And that means no 'Value Added Tax', 'Sales Tax' or any other thing not directly related to quantity, amount or hazard of a given good.  Taxation for tonnage is also removed unless it has safety or verification inspections involved.  The federal government can tax per gallon, per carton of cigarettes, or by any other gross weight and measure so long as it involves upkeep of infrastructure due to those particular items in the way of hazard or safety.

What no government can do is tax by VALUE of the trade involved.

Thus a nickel per gallon on tax is there without regard to the actual cost per galloon.  It is there if it is a penny per gallon and it is there if it is ten thousand dollars per gallon: the quantity is what matters, not the value.  And do note that is for interstate sales, only, so that in-State sales remain the realm of the State government.

Governments will always seek new sources of revenue and tax the hell out of anything they can get their hands on and yet still be unable to balance their budgets.

A free people have an 'out' from onerous taxation: our fellow citizens in the other States under this Free Trade Agreement embedded in the US Constitution.  As a remedy to overburdening of taxes this is one of the most sublime resorts that the ordinary citizen has to escape taxes, become closer with his fellow citizens and support the Union between the States.

Because that is the realm of the Preamble of the US Constitution and note who is invoking it and what we promise to do:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.