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I want
Individual Freedom
Personal Responsibility
Minimum Government
Minimum Taxes

Dale Ogden for Governor
of California 2010
www.dalefogden.org

“Small Government is Beautiful”

For more information, e-mail
info@dalefogden.org

“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents...” --James Madison

“Any alleged ‘right’ of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.” — Ayn Rand

“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, Query 19, “Manufactures” [1781]

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H.L. Mencken

“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding.” — Judge Louis D. Brandeis

“Obama, Reid and Pelosi might snicker, but they obviously don’t understand the difference between [Las] Vegas and Washington D.C. You know what it is? In [Las] Vegas the drunks gamble with their own money.” —Wayne Allyn Root [Libertarian Candidate for Vice President 2008; likely Presidential candidate 2012]

3/10/2010: In Praise of Educational Pluralism by Danny Shahar

I often hear it said that if the government did not determine what our children are taught, we would have no way to assure they learned the right things. The idea here is that every child deserves a proper education and that, although government education has its share of problems, at least we can keep an eye on who is being allowed to teach and what they are teaching. The free market, on the other hand, would supposedly allow us no such control; schools could simply teach whatever they wanted, and our children might grow up thinking that up is down, black is white, and right is wrong.

While this argument comes from the best of intentions, it is completely misguided for two basic reasons. The first, which has been widely discussed elsewhere, is that it gives an unreasonably pessimistic view of how a free-market education system would look. In a free market, competition would force producers to cater to their customers or risk losing business to other firms. This should lead us to expect that when customers are free to choose, producers will end up creating better products, not worse.

And in fact we can see this happening in the real world. For example, the success of graduates from particular universities reflects on the quality of the education there, so universities are constantly trying to better themselves and their current students in order to compete for the best students in the future. The same seems to be true of private and preparatory schools at the high-school level and below. Although the government funds a number of these schools, universities and private schools are generally permitted to make their own decisions about what they will teach and who will be doing the teaching. And yet we do not see these institutions systematically teaching their students poorly or indoctrinating them with false ideologies. On the contrary, it seems fair to say that these more laissez-faire systems generally perform far better than our centralized public school system.

But there is another reason to question the idea that governments must be involved to ensure that our children receive a proper education. That reason is that there is no such thing as a proper education. Different people have different conceptions about what kinds of lives they want to lead, what kind of knowledge is important, and how they want their children to be raised. These differences do not represent right and wrong. Rather, a free society will always be characterized by reasonable pluralism in values and worldviews. But if this is the case, then it seems the idea that we should all get together under one roof and democratically decide how to educate our children is a bad one.

Instead, it’s sensible to welcome a number of different approaches to education, with the crucial decisions about how children are to be educated ultimately left to their parents. As philosopher David Schmidtz writes in Elements of Justice: “In effect, there are two ways to agree: We agree on what is correct, or on who has jurisdiction—who gets to decide. Freedom of religion took the latter form; we learned to be liberals in matters of religion, reaching consensus not on what to believe but on who gets to decide. So too with freedom of speech. Isn’t it odd that our greatest successes in learning to live together stem not from agreeing on what is correct but from agreeing to let people decide for themselves?”

For far too long we have ignored the possibility that in a society which embraces freedom of belief, religion, and expression, it is best to respect people’s freedom to decide for themselves how they want their children educated. I understand that some may feel shocked by the suggestion that they do not know what is best for everyone else’s children. But for the rest of us, it is clear that the only fair and equitable solution to the differences in our values and worldviews is to reject the flawed model of centralized government education and to put the power to choose back in the hands of parents.

3/9/2010: About That Pay Cut For Federal Workers by Brian S. Wesbury and Robert Stein
We stand behind the idea.

Last week we wrote that one way the federal government could show it was serious about the budget deficit would be an across-the-board pay cut of 10% for all civilian federal workers. Although the savings would be only about $15 billion per year (roughly 1% of the budget deficit), the “cut” would send a clear signal to our creditors that policymakers were concerned about the deficit and were willing to take on sacred cows.

It seems like we touched a nerve. No article we’ve ever written has generated as much response.

In the larger picture, this is a bad sign. If government has become so big that articles about changes to government generate more interest than articles about stock prices, then government has become too big and too entangled in the lives of the American people. Government has become the intermediary in so much of our life that it has crowded out ways of relating to each other through civil society itself.

That said, while many of the comments we received were supportive, the majority were downright hostile. Some were too silly to warrant a reply. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but those comments seemed to come from federal employees during work hours.

Other criticisms, including some from government workers, were more serious and fell into a couple of groups. One argument against the pay cut was that many young federal workers are already underpaid.

Truth be told, we’re sympathetic. Young workers may do the same jobs as older workers, yet they receive much lower pay--think TSA passenger screening. But, since federal pay is based on seniority, they can move up that scale rapidly, and once ensconced in the federal system become very difficult to dislodge. While the federal system attempts to use merit-based pay, the seniority system can undermine the productivity improvements that come from merit.

In addition, federal pensions are generous when compared to the private sector, as is worker pay and other benefits. A story published in USA Today three days after our last column showed that federal workers were paid more than their private-sector counterparts in more than 80% of occupations. And that does not include benefits, which are on average four times higher in the public sector vs. the private sector. Maybe that’s why the statistics show that federal workers only quit their jobs at about 25% the rate of private-sector workers. This is an amazing difference. If that’s not the definition of highly paid, we’re not sure what is.

Another argument used by government employees was that the earnings of federal workers get spent in the local community, which multiplies the benefits of their pay across the economy. So a pay cut would hurt the economy.

This multiplier argument is fallacious and worries us because it seems that government employees do not understand basic economics. Every dollar the federal government pays its workers has to come from someone else (through taxes or borrowing), who would have spent it anyhow. Why is a federal paycheck any more likely to be multiplied than a private paycheck?

Even if you buy into the idea that a boost in federal spending can temporarily have a multiplier effect, raising pay for government workers--who would provide the same services anyhow--is wasteful. The same money could be spent on hiring new workers to perform additional tasks, like providing greater port security, for example.

Also, the “multiplier” argument implicitly accepts that federal workers are not really paid for the value of the services they render, but instead receive a premium for some larger social good. In essence, they are saying federal pay is a form of “workfare,” a hybrid of a paying job mixed with a welfare payment. That’s a reason to cut pay right there.

We are ready for more criticism... and support... from our readers, but we think we’ve made our point.

Brian S. Wesbury is chief economist and Robert Stein senior economist at First Trust Advisors in Wheaton, Ill.They write a weekly column for Forbes. Brian S. Wesbury is the author of It’s Not As Bad As You Think: Why Capitalism Trumps Fear and the Economy Will Thrive.

3/8/2010: from the Patriot Post: “No man in his senses can hesitate in choosing to be free, rather than a slave.” —Alexander Hamilton

Liberty: “While American politicians and intellectuals have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision. Tyrants denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are the chief supporters of reduced private property rights, reduced rights to profits, and they are anti-competition and pro-monopoly. They are pro-control and coercion, by the state. These Americans who run Washington, and their intellectual supporters, believe they have superior wisdom and greater intelligence than the masses. They believe they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Like any other tyrant, they have what they consider good reasons for restricting the freedom of others. A tyrant’s primary agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market. Why? Markets imply voluntary exchange and tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrant thinks they should do. Therefore, they seek to replace the market with economic planning and regulation, which is little more than the forcible superseding of other people’s plans by the powerful elite. We Americans have forgotten founder Thomas Paine’s warning that ‘Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.’” —George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams

Insight: “Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude. A people enslaves itself, cuts its own throat, when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes on the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or, rather, apparently welcomes it.” —French judge, writer, political philosopher Etienne de la Boetie (1530-1563)

The Left: “The abuse of federal political power to intervene in areas such as Americans’ private health care could exist only in a nation that no longer holds its leaders accountable to its constitution and that has governmental leadership that regards itself as above its people and its constitution. Sadly, I was listening to an interview the other day in which President Barack Obama described the U.S. Constitution as ‘an imperfect document ... a document that reflects some deep flaws ... (and) an enormous blind spot.’ He also said, ‘The Framers had that same blind spot.’ In so doing, the president established a rationale and justification for disregarding the Constitution. Even worse, he placed himself above the Constitution and those ‘blind Framers,’ who just couldn’t see the big picture as he does today. After all, he’s the constitutional scholar, and the Framers were just, well, the creators of the document!” —columnist Chuck Norris

The Last Word: “Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists — sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily ‘compassionate’ statists, but always statists. The short history of the postwar welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect ‘conservatives,’ as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppence-ha’penny or some such would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place. Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A big-time GOP consultant was on TV crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass ObamaCare because it’s so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November. Okay, then what? You’ll roll it back — like you’ve rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you’ve undone the Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel ‘n’ dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus: ‘Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?’ Indeed.” —columnist Mark Steyn

3/7/2010: Case For a Scythe? by George Will

WASHINGTON -- It is said, more frequently than precisely, that the reasons the Supreme Court gives for doing whatever it does are as important as what it does. Actually, the court’s reasons are what it does. Hence, the interest in the case the Supreme Court considered last week.

It probably will result in a routine ruling that extends a 2008 decision and renders dubious many state and local gun control laws. What could -- but, judging from the justices’ remarks during oral argument, probably will not -- make the ruling momentous would be the court deciding that the two ordinances at issue violate the 14th Amendment’s “privileges or immunities” clause. Liberals and conservatives submitted briefs arguing, correctly, that this clause was intended to be a scythe for slicing through thickets of state and local laws abridging fundamental liberties.

The Second Amendment says: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Until 2008, the court had never clarified whether the prefatory clause makes this right conditional: Does the amendment protect an individual’s right to own firearms, or does it protected that right only in connection with a state’s right to organize a militia?

In 2008, the court struck down a District of Columbia law that effectively banned possession of handguns even in an owner’s home -- it banned all guns not kept at businesses, or disassembled or disabled by trigger locks. The court held, 5-4, that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ rights.

But the court answered only the question then posed, which concerned the federal enclave of D.C. Left unanswered was whether the amendment protects that right against severe restrictions by state and local laws.

The oral argument concerned ordinances in Chicago and suburban Oak Park that are indistinguishable from the D.C. law. The court probably will overturn those ordinances by holding that another part of the 14th Amendment -- the guarantee that no state shall deny liberty “without due process of law” -- “incorporates” the Second Amendment. The justices evinced scant interest Tuesday in resurrecting the “privileges or immunities” clause by revisiting an incoherent decision rendered in 1873.

To the drafters of the 14th Amendment, the phrase “privileges or immunities” was synonymous with “basic civil rights.” But in 1873, the court held that only some of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights restrict states by being “incorporated” into the 14th Amendment’s “due process” clause.

Since 1897, the court has held, with no discernible principle, that some rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are sufficiently fundamental to be “incorporated” but others are not. This doctrine bears the oxymoronic name “substantive due process.” Substance is what process questions are not about.

If the court now “incorporates” the Second Amendment right via the “due process” guarantee, that will be progress because it will enlarge the sphere of protected liberty. And even Justice Antonin Scalia, who recognizes that “substantive due process” is intellectual applesauce, thinks it is too late to repudiate 137 years of the stuff. Still, three points argue for using the “privileges or immunities” scythe against the two gun ordinances.

First, protecting the individual’s right to keep and bear arms for self-defense was frequently mentioned by those who drafted and ratified the 14th Amendment, the purpose of which was to protect former slaves and their advocates from being disarmed by state and local governments determined to assault their security and limit their autonomy.

Second, the central tenet of American political philosophy is that government is instituted not to bestow rights but to protect pre-existing rights, aka natural rights -- those essential to the flourishing of our natures. In its 2008 decision, the court affirmed that the Second Amendment did not grant a right to keep and bear arms, it “codified a pre-existing right.”

Third, “privileges or immunities” are all those rights that, at the time the 14th Amendment was ratified, were understood to be central to Americans’ enjoyment of the blessings of liberty.

Liberals might hope and conservatives might fear that a revivified “privileges or immunities” clause wielded by liberal justices would breed many new “positive rights” -- to welfare, health care, etc. But conservatives know that “substantive due process” already has such a pernicious potential. And they believe that if -- a huge caveat -- it remained tethered to the intent of its 19th-century authors, the “privileges or immunities” clause would be useful protection against the statism of the states.

3/7/2010: Why the Left Despises Personal Responsibility by Kevin McCullough

If you wish to see an enjoyable evening with friends become quite animated, then overly hostile, and end in exacting bitterness, ask those in attendance to choose between the following.

As an individual citizen, is it more American to believe that you have a personal responsibility to be personally accountable for your actions, and those of your family? Or is it more American to believe that you should wait for the giant collective to take care of you?

This did not use to be a controversial concept. Until liberals decided that power is more highly coveted than freedom. Once they did, they started systematically enslaving people to the collective. Take the President for example.

President Barack Obama’s tendency to drink too much, and his inability to stop smoking was revealed publicly this week. His refusal to stop smoking, and his need, according to the White House physician’s official diagnosis, to moderate his alcohol consumption are huge red flags, health-wise. In fact aggressive or “non-moderate” alcohol intake, and cigarette smoking specifically (pipes and cigars are not nearly as dangerous) contribute to many poor health factors that do not show up immediately. Yet everything from heart disease to various cancers can be accelerated due to these behaviors.

But in President Obama’s world, personal responsibility barely means anything. He seldom exhibits it, and the nation that voted for him reviles it.

“Oh too far, Kevin,” you may be saying.

But it’s not.

On my nationwide morning show on March 2, 2010, I asked this very question, and the responses floored me. Geographically speaking, it made no difference. From the east, west, north, and south, protestations and attempted justifications declared repeatedly that the collective has more responsibility for the individual’s happiness than the individual.

And friends if this IS the belief of the nation, we’ve lost America.

The reason our founders were so attentive to individual rights, and focused so hard to embed them into the bedrock of our legal outlines was because they understood that to be at the mercy of the collective, was in fact to be at the mercy of a powerful few.

President Obama may not wish to curb his habits as it relates to his health. But generally speaking, such risky behavior should put him outside the boundaries of expecting to have other people pay for his cancer surgery, his diseased liver, or the eventual recovery from a stroke or heart attack should the unthinkable occur.

He, however, (who ironically will be guaranteed all of that and more through the tax-payer employment benefit we bestow on him for his service to us in office) will argue again and again that it should be the requirement of the neighbor who eats fresh vegetables to pay for the costly therapy of the guy who lunches daily on Big Macs.

Thus this is the irony wrapped in the enigma.

Liberals claim the collective owes the individual, while elected liberals who hold office make such arguments to attain greater power as the masses become enslaved to entitlement, falsely thinking they’re getting what is owed them.

In reality, God states that man (genus not sex) shall provide for and protect his family. In reality, God has instructed that lazy men should not receive the fruits of other men’s labor. In reality, God makes it clear that if a man does not work, he should not eat. (Meaning that intentional slothfulness is not to be rewarded if society is to function properly.)

The irony of all this is also not lost on me.

Individuals who wake up in the morning, rub their eyes, and know in their hearts that they will only rise or fall by the results of their own efforts, also categorically tend to also be the people who are the most generous with those who do fall on hard times. Giving billions each year to ease the pain of hunger and suffering in other lands, while at the same time taking dinner to a next door neighbor who just lost his job.

Those who sit waiting for the collective to care for them do so at the expense of the survival of free society.

But if you’re President Obama, or any one of his millions of supporters, what do you have to lose in another few drinks before bed, or sneaking a smoke before the girls get home from school?

Hey, if something bad does happen... He doesn’t have to pay for it!

3/5/2010: from Best of the Web By James Taranto

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman takes note in his New York Times column of what he calls “the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties”:

Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.

“What Democrats believe,” he says “is what textbook economics says”:

But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

Krugman scoffs: “To me, that’s a bizarre point of view--but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.”

What does textbook economics have to say about this question? Here is a passage from a textbook called “Macroeconomics”:

Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. . . . In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker’s incentive to quickly find a new job. Generous unemployment benefits in some European countries are widely believed to be one of the main causes of “Eurosclerosis,” the persistent high unemployment that affects a number of European countries.

So it turns out that what Krugman calls Sen. Kyl’s “bizarre point of view” is, in fact, textbook economics. The authors of that textbook are Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. Miss Wells is also known as Mrs. Paul Krugman.

It seems Krugman himself lives in two different universes--the universe of the academic economist and the universe of the bitter partisan columnist. Or maybe this is like that episode of “Star Trek” in which crewmen from the Enterprise switched places with their counterparts from a universe in which everyone was the same, only evil.

Like Spock, the evil Krugman is the one with the beard.

3/2/2010: from Best of the Web: Is ‘Climate Science.’ Science?

Phil Jones, head of the scandal-plagued Climate Research Center at the University of East Anglia, testified yesterday before a committee of Britain’s Parliament, the Times of London reports:

Professor Jones denied that he had tried to prevent alternative views being published by influencing the process of peer review under which scientific papers are scrutinised.

He said: “I don’t think there is anything in those e-mails that supports any view that I have been trying to pervert the peer review process . . .” He added that it “hasn’t been standard practice” in climate science for all data to be disclosed.

In one of the emails, as the Washington Post reported in November, Jones wrote: ““I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow--even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Sounds perverted to us.

As for Jones’s claim that disclosing data “hasn’t been standard practice,” the Times reports on an authoritative rebuttal:

The Institute of Physics said that e-mails sent by Professor Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, had broken “honourable scientific traditions” about disclosing raw data and methods and allowing them to be checked by critics. . . .

In a written submission to the committee, the institute said that, assuming the e-mails were genuine, “worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.”

The e-mails contained “prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law,” it added.

At this point, there’s a real question as to whether “climate science” even deserves to be called science.

Great Moments in Higher Education

“San Francisco high school students, just months out of middle school, can start earning San Francisco State college credit this fall through a ninth-grade ethnic studies course,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle. Apparently this is not a joke:

The program is designed for students who might not otherwise be considering college as an option, said Jacob Perea, dean of the School of Education, who runs the Step to College program at San Francisco State.

“We’re not really looking for the 4.4 (grade point average) students,” he said. “We’re looking for the 2.1 or 2.2 students.”

Students cannot fail the class. They either receive a “pass” grade or are withdrawn from the course if it appears they cannot pass, Perea said.

“All we do is give them an opportunity,” he said. “I do believe that (the ethnic studies) course is a course set up so the kids will come out of there with the kind of information that a freshman here taking an ethnic studies course will have.”

The content of the courses offered in the Step to College program are reviewed by CSU faculty to ensure that they’re equal to any offered at the university.

What does it tell you about the California State University system that its classes are equal to those offered high school freshmen?

On a more serious note, however, this may suggest a way out of California’s budget mess: Why not abolish high schools, fire all their unionized teachers, and send kids straight from middle school to CSU?

3/2/2010: Meddling Where We Oughtn’t...Yet Again
by Fred Reed [Fred on Everything]

Mexico, if left alone, would be a reasonably successful and stable country of the upper Third World. It isn’t Haiti, isn’t Bangladesh, isn’t a dying patient with multiple tubes in every orifice. If not strong-armed into chaos, it would be all right.

But the United States won’t leave it alone. Washington is pushing it to wage Washington’s “war on drugs.” As usual, Washington has no idea what it is doing. Nor does it care. Should untoward consequences follow, it will be surprised, this being the characteristic condition of American foreign policy.

Untoward consequences are quite available. The narcotraficantes that Mexico is supposed to fight for Washington are a formidable armed force. They have unlimited money, which they use to buy heavy weapons. They have unlimited money, which they use to corrupt the government of a comparatively poor country. Mexico does not have the wherewithal to fight them. The army here is small and poorly armed. This is reasonable since Mexico has neither territorial ambitions nor enemies. Except, certainly in effect, the United States.

The government is outgunned by the narcos. Further, the traffickers have the advantage of being dispersed and invisible. The situation is, or quickly could be, exactly that faced by the US in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: narcos can appear from nowhere, blow up police stations, assassinate judges, or kill a dozen teenagers at a party. Then they disappear.

Thus they can destabilize the nation and hold the population hostage. This doesn’t bother Americans, who barely know where Mexico is. It bothers Mexicans, who know their people are dying in an exported American war.

Bear in mind that anti-Americanism thrives here and throughout Latin America. Much of it is justified; some of it isn’t. The US population, the most comprehensively ignorant of the advanced world, knows nothing of the reasons or of the countries. But the hostility is real. Shrugging it off could prove a mistake.

If Mexicans had to choose between the drug lords, who are often seen as counter-culture heroes, and the US, seen as an enemy too dangerous to be openly called an enemy, many would go with their compatriots in the drug trade. A repertoire of narco-corridos, songs glorifying the narcos, exists. Los Tigres del Norte in Sinaloa have specialized in these.

Although Mexico doesn’t have America’s festering antagonisms--blacks hate whites hate browns hate men hate women hate Jews— there are groups, particularly in Chiapas, who are potential insurgents. If they should ally themselves with the narcos and go to the mountains, or set up cells in the cities, the result would be a long, bloody civil war: Afghanistan on the US border. This is not Freddian fantasy. Thoughtful Mexicans worry about it.

The Mexican army cannot handle an uprising of any magnitude. The Pentagon would then intervene to “help” Mexico. Que dios nos ayude.

The Pentagon is working toward intervention, whether it knows that it is or not. There is something called the Merida Initiative, in which the US supplies money and advice to transform Mexican society to combat the narcos. The colonels in the Five-Sided Squirrel Cage really believe they can reform the Mexican judiciary and infuse the police with virtuous fervor for American ideals. I spoke to a field-grade American officer about this. He had taken a six-month intensive course in Spanish at the Defense Language Institute and spoke less Spanish than my daughter did after two weeks here. The money would be used to reform the Mexican government, he said, which would then make short work of the narcos. He explained this with the earnest mission-orientedness that officers display when they are about to do something senseless.

I didn’t say, “Give me a freaking break,” because I knew it would accomplish nothing. You don’t “reform” countries you don’t understand by solemn brainless enthusiasm. The money would vanish like water in dry sand. Mexico does not want to be remade in the image of the United States, for remarkably good reasons. The more the US meddles, the less legitimate the government that permits it will be. Not a good idea.

Why does the military regularly misestimate the nature of the Third World? Because soldiers live, and think, in a rigid, conformist, orderly world in which good (us) and evil (them) are starkly distinct, in which one gives orders and things happen, in which all are on the team and working toward a common goal. Officers are insular, self-righteous, ruthless (after all, they are fighting Evil) and clueless. The workings of the Third World are the polar opposite of orderliness of the military. The colonels are instantly lost in the complex relationships, informal arrangements, family loyalties and invisible politics of Latin America. And they do not understand that when they intervene, they are not the good guys.

This is why we hear again and again from some buzz-cut horse’s ass with stars on his shoulders about how we are trying so hard to “help the Afghan people.”

One might ask: Why are drugs Mexico’s problem? Americans, huge numbers of them, want drugs. If they didn’t want drugs, the narcos couldn’t sell the stuff. But the American government doesn’t want its citizens to have drugs. Fine. Let the government attack its own citizens. Leave others out of it.

Washington isn’t going to rid the US of drugs any more than it rid the country of alcohol. Popular demand is far too great. The US crawls with crank labs, open-air crack markets, meth cookers, fields of marijuhweenie too large not to have been noticed by state authorities. California talks of legalizing grass in defiance of the Feds. All God’s chillun loves drugs—good ol’ boys, Ivy League students, their professors, high-school kids, middle-class suburbanies, congressman, musicians, and several Republicans. Mexico is going to change this? They must be smoking something good in DC.

A friend recently told me of being in a boat off Florida with several honeys in bikinis aboard. A Coast Guard cutter pulled alongside because the guys wanted to look at the babes. My buddy, being sociable, hollered, “What are you guys doing?”

“We’re looking for drugs.”

“Oh. We’ll follow you.”

Whereupon the Coast Guardies broke out laughing. Even the cops don’t really care.

Mexico can’t fix things, if indeed they are broken. Leave the place alone.

3/3/2010: Who Poses the Greater Threat? by Walter E. Williams

Bill Gates is the world’s richest person, but what kind of power does he have over you? Can he force your kid to go to a school you do not want him to attend? Can he deny you the right to braid hair in your home for a living? It turns out that a local politician, who might deny us the right to earn a living and dictates which school our kid attends, has far greater power over our lives than any rich person. Rich people can gain power over us, but to do so, they must get permission from our elected representatives at the federal, state or local levels. For example, I might wish to purchase sugar from a Caribbean producer, but America’s sugar lobby pays congressmen hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to impose sugar import tariffs and quotas, forcing me and every other American to purchase their more expensive sugar.

Politicians love pitting us against the rich. All by themselves, the rich have absolutely no power over us. To rip us off, they need the might of Congress to rig the economic game. It’s a slick political sleight-of-hand where politicians and their allies amongst the intellectuals, talking heads and the news media get us caught up in the politics of envy as part of their agenda for greater control over our lives.

The sugar lobby is just one example among thousands. Just ask yourself: Who were the major recipients of the billions of taxpayer bailout dollars, the so-called Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)? The top recipients of TARP handouts included companies such as Citibank, AIG, Goldman Sachs and General Motors. Their top management are paid tens of millions dollars to run companies that were on the verge of bankruptcy, were it not for billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Politicians preach the politics of envy whilst reaching into the ordinary man’s pockets, through the IRS, and handing it over to their favorite rich people and others who make large contributions to their election efforts.

The bottom line is that it is politicians first and their supporters amongst intellectuals who pose the greatest threat to liberty. Dr. Thomas Sowell amply demonstrates this in his brand-new book, “Intellectuals and Society,” in which he points out that: “Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the twentieth century was without his intellectual supporters, not simply in his own country, but also in foreign democracies ... Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler all had their admirers, defenders and apologists among the intelligentsia in Western democratic nations, despite the fact that these dictators each ended up killing people of their own country on a scale unprecedented even by despotic regimes that preceded them.”

While American politicians and intellectuals have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision. Tyrants denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are the chief supporters of reduced private property rights, reduced rights to profits, and they are anti-competition and pro-monopoly. They are pro-control and coercion, by the state. These Americans who run Washington, and their intellectual supporters, believe they have superior wisdom and greater intelligence than the masses. They believe they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Like any other tyrant, they have what they consider good reasons for restricting the freedom of others. A tyrant’s primary agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market. Why? Markets imply voluntary exchange and tyrants do [not] trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrant thinks they should do. Therefore, they seek to replace the market with economic planning and regulation, which is little more than the forcible superseding of other people’s plans by the powerful elite.

We Americans have forgotten founder Thomas Paine’s warning that “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

3/1/2010: from the Daily Reckoning

The zombies are taking over! Stocks went up 4 points on the Dow on Friday... Gold went up $10. Noise. Distraction. Headlines. Opinions.

The important trend is the big one – the shift of resources from the private sector to the public sector. During the bubble years, the private sector made a big, big mistake – taking on far too much debt.

Now, it is correcting its mistake...reluctantly, painfully, and with plenty of foot-dragging and interference from the government. Instead of letting the dead die in peace...the feds are pumping financial adrenaline into their veins...turning them into zombies.

It’s expensive work...so government is now making the same mistake the private sector made a few years ago. It’s pretending that debt-fueled spending is the same as growth. Ain’t no such thing.

The feds’ “growth” is even more pernicious and counterfeit than the bubble era growth in the private sector. At least people actually wanted houses...they just couldn’t afford to pay for them.

The feds, on the other hand, produce things that people wouldn’t buy even if they had the money – zombie products. Who would buy a billion- dollar software program to spy on other people? Who would pay other people to do nothing? Who would take on the debts of a failing financial institution?

Consider this, from Bloomberg: “Fannie Mae will seek $15.3 billion in US aid, bringing the total owed under a government lifeline to $76.2 billion, after its 10th consecutive quarterly loss.

“The mortgage-finance company posted a fourth-quarter net loss of $16.3 billion, or $2.87 a share, Washington-based Fannie Mae said in a filing yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Fannie Mae, which owns or guarantees about 28 percent of the $11.8 trillion US home-loan market, has been hobbled by a three-year housing slump that wiped 28 percent from home values nationwide and led to record foreclosures. The company, which posted $120.5 billion in losses over the previous nine quarters, and rival Freddie Mac were seized by regulators in September 2008.”

Did you read that carefully? Fannie Mae guarantees almost a third of the $12 trillion home mortgage market – or about $4 trillion. And guess who guarantees Fannie Mae? You do!

Fannie made bad loans. It ought to be put down, like a horse with a broken leg. But Fannie’s bondholders don’t take a loss. The losses have been moved to the public sector and Fannie itself has been turned into a zombie company.

Assets, liabilities, spending – it’s all shuffling over to the government...and sucking the life out of the private sector. In the area of durable goods, only about 4.4% of them, on average, were purchased by the pentagon over the last 17 years. But since the beginning of the financial crisis, durable spending by private industry decreased...while pentagon spending went up. The most recent figures show that 8% of durable orders are now bought by the military.

Recovery? Don’t bet on it. This government spending only makes it look like a recovery. The numbers may show an increase in durable goods sold, but tanks and armored personnel carriers don’t lead to genuine growth. They lead to Soviet-style zombie growth...by the government, of the government, and for the government. The rest of the economy shrinks…

Everyone says the euro is falling apart...that Europe itself can’t survive as a political unit.

Europe seems to lack the things that make for a strong political system. It has no common language, for example (there are more than 200 different languages in Europe). And it has no common culture either...or even a common religion...or a common race.

The Greeks are rioting in the streets. They’re upset because their government is trying to cut back on “services.” Actually, it’s not the services that anyone would miss. It’s the money. The rioters are mostly people who live, in one way or another, at the expense of others...thanks to the government. They work for the government...or get handouts from it.

The poor Greek government is stuck. As in almost all other democracies [just like California], politicians bought votes by giving out jobs and money. This leads to a bidding war...in which political parties vie for favor with the voters by offering more and more “services.” One gives away bread. The other prefers circuses. Whether it is food stamps or foreign wars...the price is high. And eventually, the bids go beyond the capacity of the economy to pay them.

Greece is at that point. So are half the US states. They’re out of money. It’s “doomsday” in Illinois, says one headline. It’s a “state of emergency,” in New Jersey.

Lenders don’t want to give them any more money. Wisely, they worry they won’t get paid back. So, lenders demand higher interest rates to cover their increased risks...which puts the Greek budget even further in the red.

The Greeks think the Germans should come to their aid. Why? Because, in a way, it was the Germans who got them into this mess. Nobody would have lent so much money to the Greeks had it not been for the strong teuton-backed euro...and the implicit promise that if the Greeks got into trouble...which everyone knew they would...the rest of Europe would come to their aid.

Well, what do you know? The Greeks are in trouble. And the Germans don’t want to come to their aid. The Germans saved. They ran their own economy better. They are one of the few countries in Europe that is living, almost, within the terms of the treaty they all signed, in which they agreed to keep deficits below 3% of GDP. The German deficit is just a little more than 3%. The Greeks don’t even come close – with a deficit of 12.7%.

In America, the situation is a little different. The economy and the population are more homogenous. And much more of the money is in the hands of the central government. The Germans don’t see why their savings should be used to bail out the Greeks. They’ve got their economy. The Greeks have theirs. In the US, while there are regional differences, there is basically one economy...with one government that messes it up for everyone.

Is the US better off? Does central planning on a larger scale make the US dollar or the US economy stronger?

In fact, the looseness of the European experiment is a strength, not a weakness. What damages a paper currency is not an act of omission; it’s an act of commission. Neglecting to provide more cash and credit is not what kills paper money; on the contrary, it’s the willingness to provide unlimited amounts of it. So far, the Americans are. The Europeans – or at least the Germans – are not.

So, we’ll bet on the euro over the long term...both the euro and the dollar are “elastic” currencies. They both get stretched out of shape. But there are more people pulling at the dollar than the euro.

In the short run, anything could happen. There are probably more reasons for the dollar to go up than for it to go down. But in the long run, our money is on the euro.

3/1/2010: “Americans cherish their independence. One interesting aspect of the spontaneous tea party movement is the constant invocation of the Founders and the prominence of the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag... Americans tend to see themselves as independent doers, not dependent victims. They don’t like to be told, especially by those with fancy academic pedigrees, that they are helpless and in need of government aid. That’s why the politically popular American big government programs – Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, student loans – all make a connection between effort and reward. You get a benefit because you’ve worked for it. [that “connection between effort and reward is rather tenuous for Social Security and Medicare] In contrast, Americans have loathed and rejected big government programs with no nexus between effort and reward. Welfare was begun in the 1930s to help widows with children, whose plight, as Russell Baker’s memoir ‘Growing Up’ showed, was often dismal. But when welfare became a mass program to subsidize mothers who didn’t work and to excuse fathers from responsibility for their actions, it became wildly unpopular. Bill Clinton recognized this when he signed welfare reform in 1996... Barack Obama, who has chosen to live his adult life in university precincts, sees... Americans generally as victims who need his help, people who would be better off dependent on government than on their own. Most American voters don’t want to see themselves that way and resent this condescension.” —Michael Barone