Unamended right

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

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

Article. V.

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

There, right at the end.

The State is granted equal suffrage in the Senate.

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

Now Amendment XVI changed the process of choosing Senators:

AMENDMENT XVII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The will to exercise this right?  Absent.

One interesting stat from early modern England

This is one of those times where a single statistic can open up a wealth of insight, and yet it does not come from our present but our past.  This one is coming from the Open Yale courses, which are freely available for viewing and have some of the most interesting professors that can have a wealth of information.  The stat comes from the 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.  To understand the transformation of England during this period it is necessary to see where it started from circa Henry VII, just before all the major changes in England took place.  I've been watching these with my lady and our side conversations tend to make the simple presentation quite long as it is necessary to pause the presentation so we can discuss material.  Thus the insight comes from that discussion.

In the mid- to late-16th century there was a relatively stable social stratification that has the Nobility at the top, the Gentry of landed estates and 'gentle birth' next, then the Yeomen class who were not of 'gentle birth' and tended to be well considered in towns and cities running trades and businesses (as well as some farms which was necessary for the era, the Craftsmen and those earning a living via craft work, and then gradations through the poor end of the spectrum which ends in Unskilled Labor.  The Clergy are considered separate (remember pre-Henry VIII) and while they can have power, it is not by lineage (as in the Nobility and Gentry) but by appointment to position (such as Bishop or Arch Bishop) by the Pope.  Literacy was low outside of those who could afford such education or that required it for daily operation (like the Clergy).  Schooling was done at home and as soon as children could contribute in any way to a household, they did so via work, first at home and then, if coming from a poorer family, by paying a Master Craftsman to take on a boy as an apprentice or by going to a household to work in any of a variety of tasks for a one year term.

This society can be characterized as stratified and one in which survival at all but the upper ranks of society is a constant pre-occupation.  Mercantile capitalism tends to fall in to the Yeomanry and Craftsman realms of society, and while the Yeomanry were socially limited they could earn quite a lot of money and purchase land from plying business trades.  Across all strata of the non-Clergy is one particularly interesting phenomena and the statistic of interest: marriage tended to be put off until the early- to mid- 20's.  This was done because establishing a new household is a costly affair (even for the rich) and must be done with much due consideration.  At the upper ranks of society choices in one's class were limited, and matches between young men and women could take time but also required agreement between families.  Sliding down into the Gentry, Yeomanry and Craftsman realms of society, men and women had a bit more in the way of choices and leeway, but parental and family consent made marriage a multi-lateral agreement in which any single party could hold a veto.  This sort of concern lessened going down to the lowest levels of society, where there was a lot more freedom for couples, agreement tended to be limited to parents, but start-up costs of a new household was high in proportion to the income of the poor.

From that this society can be said to have a high overhead cost of maintenance to it: it costs a lot of time as well as funds to get a household going.  Child birth, statistically, would happen within 18 months of marriage and then be a cyclic affair every 2 or 3 years of the woman's childbearing years.  Added to this was the high rate of infant mortality, endemic diseases, pandemics of plague, plus the normal assort of death by accidents, and life expectancy, while better than in Neolithic times, tended to be in the mid-30's with rare individuals surviving past 60.

Why is this interesting?

My lady was startled because of the American experience with families up to the early 20th century: large families with marriage happening in the late Teens.  Many marriage laws for what society would consider 'children' today included age of consent down to 12 in some States.

There are important changes by the start of the 19th century for Americans, but the life expectancy had not increased much over the 16th century, and while the Industrial Revolution would begin to transform America after the 1820's, American family size continued to be large even with advances in medicine, public sanitation and better diet.  Taking these factors into consideration, there is one other major factor that is encountered in the US that sets it apart from its Early Modern English forbearers in the 16th century: it is a society of not much in the way of 'classes' and it is one with a low overhead for maintenance.

The first is relatively self-explanatory, and while there were major land and slave holders in the Southern States (an equivalent of the Gentry class circa 16th century England)  and huge differences between those living in cities and those in rural areas, these are not largely different from the share-cropper system and differences between city and rural folk of the 16th century.  Without the rest of the class structure to burden the system and plenty of wilderness to settle in what happened is that the Americans of the early 19th century gained a definition that stuck until the early 20th century: a Frontier Culture.

By now, of course, this has interrupted all viewing of the course as this is a vital topic but approached in an oblique way.  There are large differences between a 'Settled' culture and a 'Frontier' culture, most of which revolve around the cost of maintenance of the infrastructure necessary to sustain the culture.  It is difficult to think of Early Modern England as a 'settled culture' but it has natural geographic limits to it, even when you consider Great Britain or the UK as a whole: these are islands and have definite boundaries and no frontiers.  Once an island has undergone initial exploration and settling, that is it for new resources and to get claimed land one must purchase it, which requires capital.  If you live in a town or city you can rent space, of course, but in the villages and household settings to have a new household requires land either by purchase or lease, and then a home on it.  There are many records in England from the late 16th century onwards, which allows us to glimpse a bit of everyday life via the records of deaths and coroner's inquests.  Prof. Wrightson recounts the death of one young woman who was working as a servant in a household who, at her death, had a total of 3 Pounds, 3 cows, and a chest containing items of clothing, bedding, bowl, spoon and the like.  Indeed an average of all deaths can actually yield that individuals owned perhaps as many as 25 to 35 items, total upon death.  The savings of a young woman was that of hoping to find a husband, marry, and establish a household amongst the poorer ranks of society.  She was already bringing something to the table for a marriage: she was gathering necessary overhead capital and goods for the start of a future household.

This is a stark contrast to the American Frontier experience that included clearing land, marrying early, and settling that cleared land for little to no overhead cost beyond sweat equity.  Raw materials were readily available, land was anywhere from free to cheap (compared to Early Modern England, at least), and the idea of 'go forth and multiply' was something that was held near and dear to the heart in reverence to God.

What is the condition of America today?

Settled.

It has a high overhead cost of maintenance to start a household.  Even with politicians distorting lending markets no end, the cost of starting a household is high.  Those that learn the Trades in America, today, actually have a low overhead cost from education: there is less burden on them and a trade craft repays the cost of education in it quickly.  A distorted market in 'Higher Education' arising from the 'good deed'  in the GI Bill post-WWII flooded colleges and universities with people which then changed the requirements in the marketplace for what is a 'minimum necessary education'.  That 'Higher Education' no longer repays itself and is a debt burden to those who go through such education and have no useful job skills at the end of it.  It is a high cost that must be paid down before starting a family.  The result?  The age of marriage has increased, couples expect both parties to bring something to the new household, children are put off for a period of time after marriage, on average and yes there are exceptions to this just as there were in Early Modern England of the 16th century.

At the lowest end of the economic spectrum there is a payment of funds from tax receipts (or in added debt) to the poor to 'care for women and children' who happen to have children out of wedlock.  Women get payments based on number of children and husbands are no longer required to get support: government has taken on that role.  The result is a liquidation of the once solid poor family structure that was purposefully uprooted during the 'Urban Renewal' that started with the Truman Administration and the movement of poor families from homes they owned to tenements they rented from under the 'Great Society' programs.  Add in payments based on childbirth to women who are not required to be married and have a stable family situation, and you liquidate the foundations of the stable culture that was once a part of the urban landscape prior to the 1950's.  Although a Nation in which by any objective standard pre-1940 there is no poverty, at all, we still have the strange belief that the poor are a condition of poverty.  And yet the poor are always with us, as being poor is part of the condition of individuals within mankind. 

Poverty, as such, was transitional in America where anyone could aspire to be a 'rags to riches' story and maybe end up in the Middle Class or at least better off than one's parents in material goods and security.  What there also used to be was no support system for the rich who failed: you could go from rags to riches to rags and cycle back and forth between them.  The establishment of regulatory regimes to allow failing concerns to remain open (and even get direct government help via taxpayer funds) means that those who make poor decisions under those regulatory regimes no longer fail and they no longer succeed, either.  They become zombie concerns depending on the lifeblood of taxpayer funds and supported regulatory regimes to survive and exist.  Any comparisons between this and later English companies supported by the Crown and later found to be bankrupt is purely coincidental with the Modern England.  In the Early Modern England there was too much upheaval to allow for such things.

Thus there are similarities of type between the US of 2014 and mid- to late-16th century England, but not of kind.  There are entirely different sets of overhead concerns for starting a household, and yet they arise for the same reason of being in a settled and geographically limited society.  The Old West in America is just that: the historical Old West.  And while there are still unsettled lands in the US, no one can rightly call them a Frontier in the expansive way of the early 19th century.  Yes Alaska is still nasty, has a low population level and if you can gather the overhead costs to establish yourself there, it has a frontier-like feel to it.  Social stratification becomes more apparent in the modern US but not due to the gentleness of birth but the connectedness to corrupt government and those that serve and service its corruption.  Just as in Early Modern England this is not a stable situation.

The result in Early Modern England was the Industrial Revolution and the great colonization effort that spanned the globe.

America, today, is at the cusp of a similar sort of transformation, as well.  It is not a dour and bleak totalitarian one, that is if we don't work to counter it.  No, it is one that also had an antecedent in Early Modern England: a New Frontier.

America has tested its endless expanse and now is home to many private concerns that dream big dreams of endless expanses of territory and wealth to be made.  It can't be made just by the rich or even with robotic systems, as those are fragile to this new and hostile wilderness.  And in this wilderness children will learn from the earliest of ages how to survive, what to do and not to do, and the rest of 'education' as we know it will be geared to those concerns first and foremost.

What happened when the English had access to new territories?  Some people were banished to them.  Others fled to them because of the freedom they offered for a new life at great risk.  They were Frontiers.  No social stratification.  Relatively low cost of overhead compared to what was left behind. Great and terrible risk to eke out a new life together with those who also decided that this was better than being settled.  Vast populations from Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Scandinavia, Spain, Italy... they followed when the cost of transportation to the Frontier was cheap enough to escape the settled lands of their old homes.

As I've said before and say again: there isn't anything so wrong with America that a New Frontier will not cure.

Freedom and Independence will beckon to us, to all mankind.

No one from the time of Henry VII could have seen the rapid changes that would follow his death.

And we can compress those massive changes of centuries down to decades, and no totalitarian power will be able to stop it once the flood gates open.

All we must do is curtail the grasp of tyranny in the present, hold it off by all means possible, and a New Frontier will open to us.  Like Early Modern England seemed a strange place to look for such transformation in its stratified ways and settled lands, so, too, does America look like a strange place to expect the push for a New Frontier.  Yet Early Modern England was pre-adapted to such things by its history and America, along with a few other Nations, is pre-adapted to Frontier culture by its cultural heritage. 

It is easy to fight tyranny in space: open an airlock.  Nature plays no favorites, but you can.

Recovery

A personal retrospective on my physical well-being.

I hope to get some more normal posts up, but such is life.

Late in 2004 I began a trip into a land of darkness where my mind was slowly losing track of work and I was beginning to feel exhausted beyond anything I had experienced in my life before that.  With that also came a lack of awareness of these things and the simple and all too human attempt to rationalize these sensations.  Being made senseless and having one's mind dimmed when aided and abetted by rationalization meant that things that should have alerted me to my dire straights were passed off... until my body forced the issue by giving me a cataleptic attack while driving.  No accident resulted, but that warned me that something truly serious was going on, even through the mists of my befuddled state of mind and being, which was turning into a strange place where being awake and being asleep meant little difference at all.

By 2005 I just wanted to know what was causing these attacks and if they could be dealt with, and the list of tests I went through was long and deep.  The only change had been in a standard medication, one of the statins, and when my endocrinologist heard the symptoms he took me off them, but the damage had been done and worse was to come after that until the full extent of it was finally reached.  My brain had the normal attributes of someone a good 20 years older than my physical age, and yet that was not a natural thing.  Narcoleptic conditions run in the male side of my family and I had thought I had escaped them as they have two general periods of onset: up to teenage years and then again in one's 60's.  Well, my brain had reached that magic age, I guess, just decades ahead of schedule.

Climbing out of that pit meant trying to get my thought structure back together as it had been shattered and eroded by this condition.  I had become a creature of willpower alone, determined not to let this be the end of my life.  The hardest work in my life would not be physical, would not be trying to write great pieces of fiction or histories to last the ages, but to merely scrape back a formulation of my thoughts out of a land between waking and dreaming and back, fully, into the land of the waking and living.  We take the fact that we think for granted, at least most people do, but somewhere within my psycho-dynamic toolkit there is a repair kit that allowed me to begin the hard work of reconstructing my mental capabilities to get some thinking capacity up and running again.

Those dark days are dealt with in my early blogging, which take place after the internal collapse of my mental structure, diagnosis and the first medications to deal with the actual phenomena.  There is no magic pill to rejuvenate the mind, as yet, to repair damage and to regain lost capacity.  Maybe we shall have that in some future, but until that point one is stuck with the old fashioned way of hard work.  I set myself some tasks to exercise my mind: learn some rudiments of Javascript, find out just what terrorism is (not the talking around it to attempt to call it something else, but its actual being as an activity) and then to learn connectivity structures based on Person-to-Person systems which are the basis for so much of human life that it pervades the far reaches of the horrific and the criminal realms.  For, as my Uncle Joe used to say disparagingly of so many corporate and government affairs, 'it isn't what you know, its who you know'.

Thus diagnosis was done by others, but I was willing to go through just about any test they cared to put me through, and I would hazard a good couple of hundred of vials of blood were taken to that end.  I have a long, long, long list of things I don't have and for that I am very thankful, indeed!  I will give the Sherlock Holmes method of scratching off stuff from a list and whatever you are left with is what it is a hat tip: it works.  Unfortunately it is the brute force method of logic, and I prefer inductive reasoning of 'this is the only thing that fits to make the entire thing work' sort of approach to the list scratching business.  As I have learned, that is a bent of mind that one must have by some means other than education as no one can teach you how to take a look at a whole thing and then see where something is missing and say what it is.

Countering the effects of the problem, although not the problem itself, came next.  I was a Type 1 diabetic before this happened and can tell you that dealing with a problem is not the same as curing it.  For all the advances in genetics, biology, biochemistry, and 3D structural analysis of molecules and how they interact, plus the human genome, a simple auto-immune disease dating back into the far reaches of human ancestry is still beyond modern medicine to cure.  Somehow every promising approach is thwarted by it.  Yet one gains a toolkit of mental requirements to deal with such a problem on a daily basis and that means I had one available for yet another problem that has no cure.  We know that there are cases of spontaneous remission of Type 1 diabetes after about 20 years of having it: the poor immune system just gets tired of fighting that part of the body and natural regeneration takes place for islet cells.  That I still have the condition points to an immune system that is still misdoing its job!  Now I also get to take medications that modern medical science can say what its structure is, but has no real idea of how it works.

There are times when I suspect the strain of being known as Witch Doctor is still with us to this day. 'What is it, what does it do?' you ask and the response is 'Dunno, it just works, take it.'

I am not nor ever have been impressed by degrees sitting up on a wall.

Doctors are still practicing medicine.  They need more practice, less overhead, please, as the practice still is not perfected.

Now all of this research, fiddling with code, playing with stuff got me to firearms as there was a warning bell going off in my head circa 2007.  A good year before the elections, hell before there were candidates, some part of me was saying: Prepare For No Good Shall Come Of This.  I took NRA training to ensure that I properly understood function and safety of firearms, plus only rudimentary cleaning... there needs to be a real course on that, not just gunsmithing but just 'how the hell do you clean this piece of Swiss watchmaking called a gun?' sort of course.  And I like older firearms, so drift punches, springs, and scouring around for parts became a ready past-time.  All of this is DIY in the firearms community, and the modern arms are much, much simpler to work with than much of the older stuff until you get back to the bolt action rifle: those are, at least, pretty simple to understand.

My goal was to next find out what sort of useful skills I had or could gain, and I'm still on that path today.  Firearms leads to stocks made of wood and that means wood finishing.  In my family lineage is woodworking going back at least a couple of generations, and I had not only shop class but a father who did cabinetry in his spare time.  That means I had some of the old 'young shop assistant' sort of deal going on, although not a lot of it, enough to get me familiar with the tools of the trade.

Building back stamina became the major goal as of 2009-10 and woodworking, well once you start using the manual tools you now have a major way to utilize physical capacity and measure endurance, now, don't you?  Even on the power tool side, the lifting and toting of boards, planks, and other less savory bits of trees can get you all sorts of exercise, especially if you have a small shop and need to set up and break down the power tools so that you can have access to the rest of the shop when you aren't using them.

Up until the past few weeks here has been the deal: 1 day of a few hours of work, 2 days of recovery.  Doesn't matter if the day is woodworking, shopping, or whatever, either.  On rare times I could string a couple of days together and then need additional down time to recover.  That was getting me to an even keel, but the boat still had water up to the gunwales and I was bailing as fast as I could.  Stamina was not returning but I at least could keep what I had.

About a month ago I talked with my neurologist who told me that there are some preliminary longitudinal studies that indicate that for diabetics in Japan and Germany (two populations with a major concern over the disorder by genetic causation) that the use of a CPAP helps to lower the HbA1c (a basal blood glucose reading that you strive to get to 7% as a diabetic) by a full 1%.  That is an eye-opener, to be sure.  A real eye-opener as a CPAP improves flow of air to the lungs while sleeping.  I had tried a CPAP before as there were indications of some marginal sleep problems, and they continue to be marginal and the neurologist doesn't know what to make of the actual readings as they aren't showing a disorder but something else going on... but that a CPAP might help that and the the cause to actually get one.

Done!

The prior CPAP device made my sleep worse, not better.

There have been improvements over the last 6-7 years, not grand ones but gradual ones, to the point where I can actually tolerate the device, more or less.

It will take some months of use to see what it does for that long term basal blood glucose reading.

A more immediate effect is to get lots of oxygen into my system at night and well distributed through my body.  I do wake up logy, no two ways about it: it is the sleep of someone who has worked themselves to exhaustion.  I knew what that felt like, back before 2004.  It is the sleep that when you wake up you just had no idea of how tired you actually were.  Apparently I need that sort of sleep.

From that sleep I now have better and larger amounts of physical energy and mental awareness longer into the day and even into the evening.  I can accomplish a lot more with the energy once I get the logy feeling out of the system.  Learning to hand plane maple that has just been skip planed is really hard work, let me tell you.  Yet I haven't been tempted to power tools (although I have a planing jig for a router) because it just feels good to be able to put some actual physical capacity into the work.  For a few hours at a stretch.  So now I can have sore muscles when I wake up!  This is a good thing.

The next step of the recovery is actually reversing not just the effects of one of my major conditions, but the thing, itself.  Those require an actual, functioning medical system in which trying to redistribute wealth and making everyone sicker in the name of 'health insurance' is not the goal.  That is an enemy to actual scientific advancement.  Strange that the most backward looking people are now on the political Left: they are starting to sound like the old fogies who just want to do things the same, tired old way that doesn't work well because that is all they know and will tell you about how righteous it is to do things the broken, tired, old way.  Yet the 21st century isn't going to wait for them to catch up, and no matter how much kicking, screaming, and theft under the guise of 'doing good' goes on, this century is set to steamroller the prior 3,000 years of advancement with changes that seemed impossible just a decade ago.  Be it the first formulation for a warp drive or getting to the bounds of computer capacity and then leapfrogging that with quantum computing or finding out that the ways to deal with disorders and diseases isn't to just ameliorate the effects but treat the damned things with some skill ('what does this drug actually do?' 'I dunno, it just works') and get the idea of practice out of the way or education that is self-performed via online systems of study that can't be categorized but can be tested as to skill, knowledge and capacity to utilize it... everything, and I do mean everything, that has been the foundation for the modern world is about to undergo a sea change that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like something for children.

Thus my goal is to survive the current bout of MegaStupidity via Centralized Insanity of Government and get to this new age of Individual Freedom and Liberty writ large.

As has been my threat: the more I recover, the less I will be posting.

I hate repeating myself and that is mostly what I would be doing to no good effect.

I need to recover so I can join this up and coming age of wonder.

The age of Back to Basics, DIY and reaching for the stars and getting off this damned starter home of a planet.

And I hope you will join me.

For we are better than the old 20th century has led us to think.

And governing is the problem, and government is not the solution.

Misrule and privacy

Do you have a fundamental right to privacy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What would you want out of such a system?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You couldn't live without your cellphone, right?

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

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

And finances are not even the start of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, yes indeed you will pay for it.

Forever.

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

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

My life is my own.

I am a free man.

Are you?

End of the moral State

This is a follow-up to my previous post on End Game Against Freedom.

From the film documentary by Andrei Nekrasov who recounted the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in Poisoned by Polonium, Litvinenko in his own words:

Who is Putin?

We are told, "Wait till he's President, then you'll know."

Imagine someone becoming prime minister in Britain with people asking, "Is he a thief, or isn't he?"  The real issue here is human morality. 

And then:

In the Soviet Union, there were two ideologies: communist and criminal.  In 1991, the communist ideology died.  The criminal remained.

What did Alexander Litvinenko do to get assassinated like he did?  When an esotaric radioactive isotope is ingested then you are beyond a simple murder and now must have the resources behind you to actually plan such a killing and acquire such material which is not readily available.  That is not the hallmark of the Red Mafia, which would normally just leave you dead someplace, anyplace, perhaps in public to make an example of you.  If the criminals want you dead, you are killed.  If you are made to suffer, that takes personal and private malice above and beyond simple criminal affairs.  When you see material involved that only a Nation with nuclear capacity and the ability to get, purify and deliver a short-lived isotope is involved you are now into State-enacted murder.  That is called: assassination.

If this is the case then the crux of the matter is the knowledge he had, which everyone, even Putin, admits are not State secrets.  Litvinenko had no access to nuclear weapons or facilities and although he did serve in the military in Chechnya, he was not a high ranking officer in the command staff, but a low level tank commander.  So what is it that made him a target to be assassinated?

Putin:

Litvinenko knew no secrets.

No State secrets, true.  But there are that other sort of secret that involves the State...

Litvinenko:

Everyone realizes I don't know any secrets.  The only secrets I know are about organized crime and corruption, and they can't legally be considered state secrets.  Even if I wanted to work for British intelligence, I have nothing to tell them.  How can I be a traitor to my country?

Why are they so angry with me?

Because I have spoken about the one thing that is important, holy to them.  One officer said to me, "You can out all our agents, to hell with them.  We'll recruit new ones.  But you did one deadly thing.  You made public our system of earning money.  Do you want us to use the underground?"

That is why they hate me so much.

This system was to choose a series of private businesses and shake them down for money by threats of bringing prosecution against them.  As was explained earlier in the documentary, FSB officers are attached to courts as 'lawyers' and they serve as a conduit to inform judges what to do, either through bribes or threats of prosecution against the judge, or just through simple replacement of the judge.  Once you take a bribe, any bribe, a judge is then compromised to the FSB.  By outing such information to the public, Litvinenko became a threat and was tried for treason.  Although he had released no state secrets, only made public those things that the government officials wish kept private about how they shake down businesses.  The implication is that this goes beyond just the FSB, although that, alone would be bad enough.

There is another reason for why Litvinenko was on the hit list, and that isn't discussed in this film.  He apparently had information on the murder of Vladimir Petukhov  the mayor in Nefteyugansk.  Before his death, Litvinenko had visited Israel and Leonid Nevzlin:

Yeah, I think in a way he held the door open with us.  He visit me three months, I think it was, before he was killed.  And he left some papers about what was really, because of some blames on me, what was really under this blame.  Because he was part of KGB and, for instance, he knew from the people in the KGB of the real case of the mayor of Neftyugansk, Petukhov.  So he left his evidence, names and etcetera, and who killed Petukhov and why he was killed...

That is from Khodorkovsky a documentary by Cyril Tuschi and yet another film I recommend for those interested in liberty, freedom and morality.  A bit later in that interview Nevzlin would tell us that he passed that information on to Israeli police and Scotland Yard.  Here is an unexpected intersection between one of the oligarchs of Russia, the KGB/FSB, Putin, Litvinenko and the stark contrast between two sides of the suppression of liberty by State power.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, as the documentary examines, is an unusual case in the Russian post-USSR power struggle as he is not part of the functionaries of the State, in main the FSB, nor a part of the criminal class that infested the rule writing of the early Russian Duma.  In those early years there was a place for the type of people that Boris Berezovsky talked about with Nekrasov:

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

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

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

Of that new entrepreneurial class was a group that would start from the ground-up, and would attempt to actually put real capitalism into play in Russia.  Of those Mikhail Kodorkovsky is the most notable as he started with next to nothing to form a bank in Russia without even knowing how a checking account worked because there had been no banks, no checking accounts, no savings accounts, nothing like that in the USSR.  They had to ask experts in to teach them the basics of banking and they did make mistakes, but also made money as Bank Menatep was far more secure than anything else in Russia at the time, which is not to say that it was secure by Western standards as the scandals that came to it demonstrated.

Bank Menatep would also fund a bid for the Yukos oil concern, which had been a State run oil system in the USSR.  Bids from outside Russia were excluded, and while there are complaints of corruption about that it must also be asked what government would want to hand over such a large concern to foreign owners?  If a reasonable and reliable bidder inside Russia could be found then why not hand it over to them?  It was sold at a fraction of its value at $300 million, which was a huge amount in those days in Russia. 

Do remember that a few years previously there had been, effectively, $0 in Russia, and Putin's swindling of St. Petersburg via non-use of sold goods abroad was placed in its lower range at $92 million.  Yukos also had $3 billion in debt, so anyone who was purchasing it was getting a massive amount of debt and the responsibility to pay it off.  This was also in a period in which Saddam Hussein was effectively bottoming out the oil market by selling Iraqi oil far under market prices so as to depress the oil market.  Given that background and realizing that transparency was necessary for running the firm, one would have expected failure of Yukos.  Instead it succeeded, wildly, because it was a transparent, open organization that allowed public scrutiny of its affairs and transactions.

From Irina Yasina journalist who worked with Khodorkovsky to help establish his education works and who was the director of Open Russia:

At some point, Yukos was also a non-transparent company.  Minority shareholders were treated badly and no quarterly reports were submitted, like in the West.  That's what it was like in the beginning. After a series of scandals, Khodorkovsky understood:  If you make a company transparent, you attract investment.  He learned from his mistakes and knew this would also make money.  So it was actually a business project. 

And that made him rich, at one point the richest man under 40 on the planet and headed to become the richest man on the planet, period. 

If oligarchs are to be deplored, and oligarchies which they are a part of, then what about an oligarch who is setting up a template for breaking up the oligarchical system?  Khodorkovsky and the people that came to Yukos were embodying a spirit that did not see them spend on lavish estates, fast cars and the high life, but something far different.  They did live in good homes, yes, but Khodorkovsky also started funding scholarships and schools.  It is forgotten that in the early days of US capitalism there were more than Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, but also Carnegie, Ford and Westinghouse.  Even Rockefeller would start building foundations, charities and just give money away.

Cyril Tuschi:

On the advice of an American PR firm, Khodorkovsky establishes in 2000 Open Russia an organization to support education in Russia.  Khodorkovsky invests $100 million in universities, boarding schools, and training programs for journalists.

In Russia, which did not have such a foundation of moral philanthropy as we know it in the West, to find it suddenly appearing in the post-Soviet era in Russia is nothing short of astounding.  Khodorkovsky, even before he was charged with crimes under Putin's regime, had started that transformation by talking of the need for a civil society so that freedom can flourish. 

From Khodorkovsky's mother, Marina Khodorkovsky:

Education! Mischa's central idea was, that democracy doesn't trickle top down.  It has to become a necessity from the bottom up. When people start to broaden their horizons, they start to think and develop other interests.  That was his core idea.

There is a central dynamic in capitalism that is a moral one and it has to do not just with wealth but its uses.  Khodorkovsky writing from prison:

I must thank prison.  In a way I am freer here than when I was leading the company. I'm only responsible for myself, here.  Here I've come to realize that owning assets, especially large assets, does not automatically make a person free at all.  As a co-owner of Yukos, I had to expend huge amounts of energy to protect this wealth.  I had to abstain from anything that might jeopardized my wealth. I also had to impose limits on myself, because speaking openly and frankly could have harmed those assets.  I had to ignore a lot and put up with many things all for the sake of my personal wealth, to preserve it and increase it.  Not only did I control this wealth, it controlled me, as well.

These are not the words nor thoughts of a man in bed with a regime or criminal organization, but a capitalist with morals and ethics speaking about what acquired wealth does to one.  Unlike George Westinghouse, Mikhail Khodorkovsky hasn't learned the morality of ethical use of capital, but he has learned the basics that even Rockefeller had to learn: when you have so much wealth you are its prisoner as well as its owner and you are the one for your own sorry state of circumscribed freedom.  The only answer to this burden is to lessen it: Andrew Carnegie sold his entire company to J. P. Morgan, while Ford ensured of good worker pay so that they could afford to actually buy the products they made, and Westinghouse concentrated on improving the workplace, work hours, working conditions, and lives of his employees so that they could own the homes the lived in that had electricity and running water in them.

Capitalism is based on providing goods that are wanted by individuals at the lowest price possible to make a profit so as to not only sustain but increase production, while lowering costs.  If no one wanted the goods or services provided, a company would go under, and yet we, in the West, now have a corrupted banking system and industrial system where companies are supported by the State and must answer to its tune.  All in the name of 'saving' such companies that rightfully deserve to fail.  If Yukos was barely able to support itself and had huge debt, then what does it say when the company is turned around, opens its books and becomes successful?  In other words it stepped free of regime support, learned what it means to be accountable to shareholders and then did the right thing to increase its transparency to increase its business and attract more capital. 

At heart capitalism and companies are moral and ethical organizations of individuals while government is an organization of power.  When companies and governments work together it is to the detriment of the moral and ethical roots of capitalism and does nothing but make stronger the power of government over its citizens.  Contributing factory space, production time and other commodities at a low price to defend a Nation where a company resides is one thing.  To take orders from government in peace time on what to make, how to make it, how to produce it and then to kick-back money to campaigns and politicians is inherently immoral as it robs shareholders of their say in the company, and unethical as it puts those in charge of the company in the position of betraying shareholders for their own interests in a share of government power and support.  It is, in other words, fraud.

Yukos was a very wealthy company and one of the wealthiest in Russia when Putin came to power.  This from Aleksey Kondaurov, former KGB general:

The relationship between Putin and Khodorkovsky was in order.  They met regularly and discussed various issues. We had good relations with the government.  After all, the operation was really very powerful.  There was no other company like ours.  We were the country's biggest taxpayer.  We paid more taxes than Gazprom, who were bigger than us.  Which is why we had a good relationship with the secret service.

Via paying taxes, Yukos becomes something quite different than the other companies run by oligarchs who had non-transparent companies: a respected business.  Transparency, paying what you owe in taxes, paying off debt, gaining investors, and becoming rich are combined together and they cannot be separated.  Becoming rich is only a sin if it is your sole and only goal, and this was not the case with Mikhail Khodorkovsky who ensured that his business did the right things to demonstrate that it had responsibilities to attend to in the governmental affairs area via good relationships with government but also to support its civil duty to pay taxes like any good corporate citizen.  It was not there asking for special privileges, special monies, special projects or other such things in promises for political support from the company.  And the FSB, Putin's own organization, understood just who it was that was the largest taxpayer in Russia and appreciated that, respected it, save for at the very highest of ranks.

Former Yukos lawyer, Dmitry Goldlobov recounts what happened:

Putin told them: "Okay guys, stay away from politics, okay?!" And everybody agreed.  Everyone nodded and said: "Okay".  Khodorkovsky nodded as well.  He didn't say: "Dear Mr. Putin, I won't stay away from politics! I'll be just in the Duma" or something.  He agreed.  And afterwards he violated that deal.

Why?  That idea behind Open Russia: a better educated civil society with many interests and a bottom up democratic institution.  To have that sort of institution, to get to a democracy, there needs to be a competition in ideas and ideologies.  And Litvinenko already told us what remained after the USSR in the way of ideology: criminal ideology.  If Boris Yeltsin had tried to build something better but was overcome by the corrupt institutions that remained, particularly the FSB but also the infiltration of the criminal class into business and politics, then what did Vladimir Putin represent?

Litvinenko had outlined this, as well:

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

If you are aware that to run an ethical concern, be it business or government, there must be transparency, and the man in charge and, indeed, the whole establishment of government, is not transparent but has a veneer of democracy on top of it, then what do you do?  Ethically you know that any agreement you make with such a government can be over-ruled by those in power at a whim.  In fact the FSB is particularly good at 'compromising' people and bringing false charges to conviction via a compromised judiciary process.  Without criminal, judicial or police help, just why would you stand by a corrupt government?  Even worse, what can you do to change it?  Khodorkovsky realized that any agreement he made with Putin was ephemeral as Putin had already been shown to be underhanded in his business and official dealings before coming to office.  A corrupt government does not gain the loyalty of ethical individuals be they citizens or corporations.

For doing this, Khodorkovsky's bank had a sanatorium, the RUS, seized by the State.  This was a good if not the best hotel in town and its seizure was rumored to be done on Putin's orders for his wife, who liked the place.  No real legal pretext was given: assets were seized without any indications of having done anything wrong.  Khodorkovsky did nothing, at first, as this was an act of raw power by the Kremlin.  Other business leaders approached Khodorkovsky to speak out about corruption in the Kremlin during their annual, televised meeting with Putin on 19 FEB 2003. Leonid Nevzlin was his business partner and summarized it like this:

Khodorkovsky was asked to bring up the topic of corruption at the Kremlin.  I remember he was unsure whether he would or not.  But it had to be done on principle.

And then Alexander Temerko, a former Yukos VP recounts:

Voloshin told Khodorkovsky: "TV will be there!  We'll instruct the stations to broadcast your speech about corruption! And Putin will definitely react in the right way."

That is charming naiveté, at best, as it must be remembered that this is the same Putin who deceived St. Petersburg, ran the KGB/FSB, worked to launder money for drug cartels in Germany and who had now taken offense that some business leader might actually be funding the opposition and responded by seizing assets using the power of the State to do so.  With those things known, and do choose just one or two before the seizure event, why would anyone expect Putin to act 'in the right way'?

From Aleksy Kondaurov, a security advisor:

At the meeting with Putin he said – and I think this sealed Khodorkovsky's fate – "We started the corruption process, so we should end it."

From Igor Yurgens, Economic Advisor to President Medvedev:

I was present at the meeting and I can tell you that, uh, uh, he handled that confrontation [?] in an arrogant manner.  To be objective I can tell you that sitting in front of the acting President accusing the President, practically, of covering up for the corruption in the State controlled oil company.  That was a little bit too much.  He could have chosen a more elegant way or less confrontational way, but what he said was true.

And part of what was said at the meeting:

Khodorkovsky - Experts from our organizations analyzed the extent of corruption in Russia and all arrived at the same figure: it is estimated at $30 billion.

Putin – You've mentioned the merger between Rosneft and Severneft.  I obviously feel that Rosneft's chairman should react to this and offer further explanation.  Although some aspects are immediately obvious: Rosneft is a state-run company which must increase its reserves.  Because these reserves simply aren't sufficient.  Some other oil companies, such as Yukos, have excessive reserves.  Yet how has Yukos achieved this?  That's a question we should discuss today. As well as payment or non-payment of taxes. We did discuss this with you previously, didn't we? Not long ago.  Your company also had difficulty paying taxes.  But respect is due to the management of Yukos – for coming to an agreement with the tax authorities – settling all claims and issues with the state.  But how were these problems created? Perhaps that is why so many people study tax law. Are you following me?  I'm hereby putting the ball back in your court.

So what is Putin's point?  Yukos, by his own admission, has paid up on its taxes and is, indeed, the largest taxpayer in Russia.  It has large reserves of oil, yes, but gained via commercial activity as he puts no other activity forward that can explain that.  Marginal tax rates are not enough to make or break expansion of reserves and if he has complaints about what prior administrations did in awarding Yukos, then why doesn't Putin want those administrations investigated?  Of course he was the head of the FSB under those administrations and if he had anything at the time, he should have spoken up.  Of course there is that matter of SPAG with Putin sitting on its board and being head of the FSB while the company was charged and convicted of money laundering for drug cartels... perhaps he had other worries at the time, eh?

What you see at work, however, is the head of a corrupt State, or soon to be head, dodging responsibility and transparency, while complaining that a transparent company that has done the right thing might be in the wrong.  If you bring up the Yukos reserves then what about Rosneft's inability to perform marginal expansion or just pay for oil on the open market, or purchase the rights from other companies to their reserves?  If there are any problems with Yukos on taxes then what about Rosneft and its main function of actually running its oil affairs competently?  This is how you cover up corruption at the State level: you blame the innocent or cast doubt on their legitimacy.  Any head of State that is pointing out all the wrongs in others, is in the process of casting them as not being upright while not addressing if he or she has the moral and ethical stature to actually accuse others of anything.  The more you hear haranguing, accusations, belittling, and bringing up past affairs that are ALREADY SETTLED, then you are hearing from someone who, themselves, have something to hide.

It is this that is the indicator of a corrupt State.  If Vladimir Putin wanted to have businesses stay out of politics then, really, the State must stay out of interfering with businesses.  The moment a State decides to wield its power to tell companies what to do or actually purchases companies to be run by the State, then the companies involved have a right, duty and obligation to protect the assets they have from their shareholders and have direct input back into the State.  This is the heart of the process of corruption and collusion between a State, any State, and its business community.  It is one thing to uphold laws of transparency of accounting, keeping good books, and being accountable to shareholders and quite another thing to impose the power of the State towards State ends on private concerns.  Russia, of course, has an entire history of just this problem, going back to the Czars and including the entire history of the USSR and now the post-Soviet era.

From this confrontation Khodorkovsky would attempt to get foreign companies, Exxon and Chevron, involved with Yukos not only to allow those companies into the Russian market but give Yukos a foothold in the American market.  He would establish a foreign outpost of Yukos in Houston, TX which would become the basis of such agreements and would also serve as a separate part of Yukos outside of Russian laws.  Of course this wouldn't do as it would make Yukos an independent, international concern.  This resulted in the arrest of Yukos leading official after Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev while he was in hospital and then whisked away to an FSB secret jail.  Isn't it wonderful when State run secret police have secret jails?  At that point Khodorkovsky started telling those close to him in the company and his family to get out of Russia because he didn't want any more hostages taken by Putin.

The State sent people to Khodorkovsky trying to extort money from him so that they would leave him alone.  But he had already seen that sort of trap: once you give money like that you are on the hook forever and they can reneg on the agreement at any time and jack up the costs on a whim.  Besides, Yukos was transparent, had regular outside audits and published those openly.  Yukos had no money to give that could not immediately be seen, and Khodorkovsky had already said that he wasn't running away from Russia as a political exile.  Yukos had paid its taxes, settled any arrears and was in good standing as a taxpaying company.  He was, in other words, not giving into the temptation of easy corruption, an easy life.  That isn't his goal any longer, but for that longer vision of an informed Russian civil society, and he knows that he will pay a price to be on that road.

Two days before his arrest giving a speech at Belgorod University, Mikhail Khodorkovsky said:

Elections alone won't build a civil society.  But it's a first step towards creating a normal state, in which it isn't merely pleasant to work, but also to live.  Let us build it together.  Thank you.

And then in a television interview on Belgorod TV the day before his arrest:

Interviewer - You were in America when your Yukos offices were searched. But you still came back to Russia.  Aren't you afraid that men with handcuffs might suddenly turn up?

Khodorkovsky – As long as our country isn't fully a civil society, nobody is safe from the people with the handcuffs.

The trial on tax evasion, itself, was a pre-determined affair run by the FSB and, ultimately, Putin.  Khodorkovky's denial for early release similar and hinged on missing a sewing class in jail, while otherwise being a model prisoner.  As his time in prison was running out Putin had him tried and convicted of other charges, stealing hundreds of millions of barrels of oil which, strangely, no one can find missing or hidden, anywhere.  Yet still he was convicted of doing the impossible.  The message was clear to those that followed Khodorkovsky's path in business or who hadn't thought that the State would reach out to seize any of the oligarchs: they fled Russia.  And who spoke out against this?

The silence from the West is deafening.

There were long standing groups working to free political dissidents in the USSR who dared speak out against the regime.  But Khodorkovsky, for all his insights into what it takes to have a civil society, gets no support.  A business man who has straightened up the ways of his company and himself, who supports a freer and more well informed society, who behaves with demonstrable morals and ethics can't get that.  Yet he did the right thing, by forming an organization with the goal of expanding the civil sphere, personally donating to schools and institutes, donating to a political opposition so that there could BE a political opposition that could get its ideas before the public.  Too bad it comes from a businessman and not some lowly transgendered artiste speaking in coffeehouses, huh?  The latter would get some press, at least.  An ethical businessman who happens to be the richest man under 40 on the planet?

Joschka Fischer, former Foreign Minister of Germany about what happened after the imprisonment of Khodorkovsky with respect to Khodorkovsky and then Yukos a bit later:

We had a vested interest in asking, can't we solve the Khodorkovsky issue –even after his arrest?  Can't we solve this, so that he might be released from prison? But Putin was highly emotional and totally rejected it.

[..]

It concerned the property right at Yukos.  In respect of which the international part of Yukos filed a lawsuit with a Texas court.  The question was: How can the property rights of Yukos be transferred? We had a meeting with former German Chancellor Schroder, Putin and myself – and the Russian Foreign Secretary.  And we met on this sailing ship that's permanently moored in Hamburg, "Rickmer Rickmers" or whatever that ship is called.  We sat below deck. Putin was quite cheerful –wel, yes, in a good mood, saying: "Tomorrow, you'll see how it works!".  Exactly that day Yukos was put up for auction and suddenly an investment group from Novosibirsk, or Irkutsk, or wherever, turned up out of the blue, made a bid for Yukos.  And was awarded the rights.  They immediately sold them on to Rosneft and disappeared into thin air.  And with this trick, the address, at which a civil lawsuit in America could have been served, simply vanished.  And Rosneft could say, "I don't know what the problem is.  We acquired it lawfully.  Any issues you have with this investment group that doesn't exist anymore are not our concern".  Therefore the whole issue, at least, regarding the legal aspects, was rigged.

That is what is left in the place of an ethical business situation: one in which a State-owned concern that can't manage itself well is given the assets via a rigged system that is opaque to all concerned in order to escape legal ramifications of seizure of property.  And those in power in the West who are elected officials and should be seeking to have other governments respect human rights?

Again from Joschka Fischer:

The world isn't what you imagine.  There are interests and values.  But the idea that there are human rights and we will enforce them by any means, is of course absurd.  Then you'd create the opposite of human rights.  That's not how the world works.

Tuschi – But you're still quite an idealist when it comes to the world in general.

Fischer – But I am also a realist.

T – No, you are not at all.

Indeed our rights are endowed to us as individuals and governments are creations of man, not Nature.  Human rights cannot be enforced by governments at all.  It is, however, governments that have the responsibility to respect human rights as they are the creation of men.  Fischer is quite right in that government is not the enforcer of rights as that would make it the granter of rights.  With that said it is not absurd for people to seek to have governments respect human rights, especially those of their citizens.

Milan Horacek, Human Rights Delegate in the EU government:

In all my human rights work, this is the first time I've defended a capitalist, but they are also entitled to human rights.  Which is why I said in my plennary speeches that, at the age of sixty, I have now decided to defend rich people.  One can't distinguish between human rights for the young, old, poor or rich. 

From Andre Glucksmann who covered some of this in the Nekrasov film:

Putin's regime is a regime of oligarchs who own Russia in its entirety, who sell their oil themselves making a huge profits while 50% of the population lives below the accepted poverty line.  So it's a regime of profiteers.  But you may call it what you like.  Of the many types of capitalism, this is one of the worst if it's capitalism.  If it's socialism, it's also very ugly.  So it's -

Nekrasov – It isn't socialism.

G – Well it does have many socialist characteristics.  There is the power of the police, the power of the army, the absence of freedom of expression. Virtually totalitarian.  I also think there are rich men who have become strong supporters of public freedom, that's to say, the rights of man, social security and so on, who find themselves in deepest Siberia.  I mean Khodorovsky.  So I think it's necessary to support both the unemployed who demand food and the capitalists like Khodorovsky, who may be called a capitalist, but he is also for freedom.  On the other hand, we must condemn all those who suppress and prohibit freedom of expression.  In my opinion, Russia has gone back to something it had under the tsars.  Always – At some points, the possibility of real reforms, efforts for reform.  But under the tsars, under communism and today, it was and is an autocracy.  What your Putin calls "vertical power".  That's the way things are now. In my opinion, that's dangerous.  Not only for the Chechens who are being massacred without anyone allowed to say how awful it is, and not only for Russia that is being stifled, but also for the West.

What we can get from these two films is that there is a deep sickness in Western culture as a whole as seen by the inaction of governments with regards to Russia.  But this goes further than just Russia or governments. 

Again from Glucksmann:

You know, France, among the elite, has always suffered from the morbid influence of a Russian mirage.  Later it was the Soviet mirage, bit it had been a Russian mirage.  In the beginning, the French salons of the 18th century were full of admiration for Catherine II and, before that, Peter the Great.  Peter the Great was received by the French Academie just like Putin now.  Together with Bernard-Henry Levy and Philippe Sollers, I wrote a petition to say it was shameful. But there is indeed a kind of innocent and inane admiration, that is to say ignorant admiration, for a state that asserts itself as rational and Western in its appearance.

Nekrasov – So what about Chechnya?

G – That's a scandal!  But even Voltaire knew that Peter the Great had killed his son under torture.  But he tried to hide this fact.  There were also some partisans of Russia at the time of the philosophers, like Diderot.  But he went to see Russia, and though he could no longer protest openly – since he was paid by Catherine II – he left some papers in his drawer.  When Catharine read them, she was appalled.  What did he write?  He wrote, "The Russia of Catherine II has rotted before it ripened."  Instead of ripening, it has rotted.  I'd say its not just the leaders.  There is something wide-spread, a wide-spread malady that exists.  When Hermann Broch, the great Austrian writer, was asked in 1945, "So you think all Germans were fascists? Nazis?" He said no.  "So?" He said, "Listen, there are Nazis, and then there are those who let them come to power, who stood by and let it happen." And that includes all Europeans, without exception. There is then a crime of indifference that is even more fundamental because it is the condition that permits the Nazi crime.  The Nazi crime itself was committed by the Nazis and the part of the population of Germany and also of Europe, but only a part.  Yet the crime of indifference that first authorized the Nazis to take power, and later to wield it in the known way, that is a general crime committed by the Europeans, the leaders and also the population. The crime of indifference consists of closing one's eyes when criminal behavior begins.

Do you see governments trying to pick winners and losers for technology?

How about bailing out banks and deciding which financial institutions need to go under and which should remain?

Have you ever seen a government bail out a failing firm for any reason beyond saving some section of it for defense related purposes?

The disease is socialism, and it doesn't matter if you call it International, National, Communism or 'The Third Way', it is a horror whenever it starts because it is utilizing the power of the State to bring society under its control via controlling its businesses either via outright expropriation (Nationalization, which means a bunch of bureaucratic cronies who don't know the business will run it) or via cronies and payoffs (which means a bunch of business people who don't know  how to run a business efficiently but do know how to grease palms is running it).

Cronyism starts via 'subsidies' and the State telling private firms and individuals what they can do through enticement.  Or via rigging the market via 'regulations', which tend to favor larger firms over smaller, since they can grease palms more thickly.  Those that point this out as corruption become the targets for well funded political attacks, which then turns into laws limiting what you can and cannot say about such activities.  Those laws are enforced by some National government police system, which typically is a Secret Service.  Power is thus transferred bit by bit from government to just a single organ of it: the Secret Police.  It may start as a form of Praetorian Guard or some such, but at some point the leader of the Guard becomes the head of State.

It is why the Red Guard was killed off by the Reds after the October Revolution: the State had the Cheka and it was far more efficient at finding threats to the State than the Red Guard was.  It is the reason the early Black Shirts in Italy were hunted down by the State.  And the SA by the SS in Germany.  Even the most fervent ideological supporters of the ruling caste found themselves on the outs when they were no longer necessary to grab State control.  In fact they were a threat to State control as they knew how to get up the rungs into power.

And the population as a whole?

Docile.  Not wanting to think about what the ends were of these means.  Lulled into poverty and then distracted by merely physical means, like hard drugs, sex, music and concentrating on frivolities while the State provided more and more of their lives until the State could decide who lived and who died.  That is the end-game of every Western terrorist group, and the object is to seize the State police power.  Mind you they never think that they can be destroyed by that same power once control over society is concentrated into the hands of the very few.  Men like Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky and Litvinenko are threats to this system as they tried to show the corruption at the heart of the State, did their best to educate themselves and then realized that the entirety of society needed to be educated as well.

Litvinenko was assassinated for speaking the truth.

Berezovsky fled and that gives him limited input into Russian society.

Khodorkovsky... he helped to set up the way the laws worked in post-Soviet Russia, and admits this and that they were as moral as they could be, those who did this, but that their society was unable to see what morality was.  Once awakened to what was wrong, he became transparent, funded education, pushed for a more open society and then funded the opposition movement.  He was no longer going to be playing the game he set up because it is corruptive, and continues past wrongs.  He subjected himself to a corrupt system with typical outcomes, which he knew.  He left Putin with a truly awful decision.

A dead Khodorkovsky is a martyr and can never, ever change how he thinks.

A live Khodorkovsky might be re-corrupted, but you also know that he knows exactly what the system can do to him and the more you make it bad, and the longer he perseveres, the worse you look.  Not manly at all for the manly Putin to have a businessman tortured because he refused to play ball.  But you can't lock him up forever.  And without him the economic system has lost its vibrancy, its ability to rapidly expand... and yet the very qualities that allow it to do that means that the State control is threatened.

As the man who spent time in jail with Khodorkovsky said: he is alive because he is standing in someone's way and they can't just kill him.  Yet, in unjust exile, his point becomes stronger by the day.  Strong enough to pierce the indifference of Russian society?

He is in jail for a reason.

Would you gladly submit to a corrupt system created by your own ignorance and indifference so as to change it?

That is the dilemma of The Prisoner and his answer still stands:

I will not be pushed, filed, indexed, stamped, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.  My life is my own.

It is the only way to be free when the State seeks absolute control over you via society.

Don't think of Khodorkovsky as a man, just as #6.  And still he smiles in court a testament to the power of just one man.

Freedom vs. Utopia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now put in place the freedom of contract. 

What do you get? 

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

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

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

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

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

It was once a revolutionary idea.

And it still is.