Thursday, May 26, 2011

On the Net, Americans Deserve Debt

Every American doesn't deserve to be in debt, but all together Americans do.

America is in a lot of debt. The total yearly income of the wealthiest nation on earth just about equals the amount it owes other nations. Americans would have to go more than a year without anything while working in order to pay off all the debt.

Being in debt is not the end of the world, but an inability to cease increasing the debt by a lot each year is a very bad thing, and America suffers from this malady now. If not cured, the debt growth will destroy America as we know it.

The person to blame is not the "Progess"ive who wants taxes raised enough to pay for socialist government programs. Neither is it the conservative who wants low taxes with a much smaller government. It is the median voter. The median voter isn't even a person really, nor is he a finite group of people. But he has the most power to shape aggregate voters' choices. If all Americans were made into a facial average like this one, then he would look just like this median voter.

But, we're not exactly comparing facial averages. We're saying that the final facial average of American voters ends up looking like a person who wants low taxes with plenty of socialist government benefits that have not been paid for. This person deserves to be in a high level of debt.

But why do Americans add up to this person and not another?

Maybe more people like low taxes than like small government. More like socialistic programs than like high taxes. The politicians want to win and don't want to lose doing the dignified thing.

Election politics may be to blame for this. Nobody would run on a campaign promising to eliminate public sector jobs and thus lose the public worker vote. Therefore nobody runs on a small government platform.

Nobody would run on raising taxes and thus lose the upper middle class taxpayer vote. Therefore nobody runs on a campaign of tax increases equivalent to the level of socialism he promises.

This paradigm is pictured in the graph below.



We assume that all those who want smaller government also want low taxes. We also assume that those who want higher taxes also want high levels of socialism. But not all those who want low taxes also want small government, and not all who want more freebies want higher taxes. Therefore, if a candidate moves to the left or right of point 2 in the graph and begins to talk about either scaling back government or raising taxes, he'll lose votes.

But maybe it's that people who just barely favor higher taxes--but not enough to vote for them--get energized to go out and vote by promises of more freebies; and those who like the idea of small government just a little bit but not enough to vote for someone espousing it, would vote for someone who espouses policies of low taxes.

Regardless, this thought experiment proves, perhaps sophomorically, that well-functioning democracy can result in calamity.

Sorry, we don't have data to back up this conjecture, but it may well be true.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Homeland Security, etc, Ushering in Feudal America?

The best history is history that sheds light on the present. There may be a connection between the Feudal System's power structure and what is developing in America as Homeland Security grows and gains power over civilians. On the other side of the ledger, things that would weaken civilians seem to be on the horizon, such as gun confiscation and faltering democracy. Consider the following from page 3 of the book pictured left wherein the author explains what kept the Feudal system in place:

As long as the nobles held their monopoly of the military profession, rebellion against their authority was futile. The short bow was the best weapon possessed by the lower classes, but its shafts were of little effect against knightly armor. Even if a peasant could find the means to procure the equipment of a knight, he would lack the training required to use it effectively. Until the non-noble class obtained wealth, leisure, or a cheap, easily used, and effective weapon, the position of the feudal aristocracy was perfectly secure.
Now, keeping all this in mind, let us observe several trends in America today that move us closer to this dynamic.

Since its creation in 2002, Homeland Security's budget has inched upward every year. With opportunists such as Rick Santorum posturing to be the greatest protector of the people, the incentive for such congressmen is to make DHS grow.

Homeland security gives the government more power to search persons and belongings than it would otherwise have--as long as government perceives a threat of terrorism. For example, because people think a terrorist attack is more likely to occur on an airplane, the groping arm of DHS, the TSA, invades people's privacy more so than a regular police officer would be able to in a place such as a subway.

More importantly, Homeland Security is locationally far-removed from the civilian population, almost as much as a feudal aristocracy would be. Whereas a police chief may reside in or nearby the neighborhood he patrols, DHS workers answer to distant federal apparatchiks, and would presumably have fewer ties to the locality which they deal with. The disconnection sets the psychological stage for inhuman treatment, almost like a class system in feudal Europe would.

Don't be fooled by the DHS website which has nice pics of workers smiling on it. Sometimes services are outsourced to save money (on something that is wasteful to begin with*), as was the case when a mercenary intelligence group populated by foreigners was caught spying on people at a second amendment rally and at an anti-gasdrilling demonstration, both in Pennsylvania. Moreover, TSA workers' attitude toward passengers--that they are “guilty until proven innocent [by strip search]”--could not be more hostile or dehumanizing.

And DHS has implemented surveillance cameras in Walmart to spy on Walmart shoppers for some reason. Maybe DHS is looking to get stills for "The People of Walmart" website.

No one would doubt that such invasiveness, spying, etc empowers the government relative to the people—and that’s what we’re getting at here. Indeed, we remain a far cry from a feudal system-scale imbalance, but empowering DHS inches us toward it.

It has been said that federal bureaus are run like independent little kingdoms and operate with the sole goal of increasing their budgets by demanding more tribute from taxpayers in return for "keeping them safe". But it is doubtful that Homeland Security does or can make us safer, and even if they do, they only do so to a very small, insignificant degree, and the invasion of privacy and loss of power to citizens may not be worth it.

We've just illustrated how DHS strengthens government, but now lets turn to things that might weaken the governed.

Gun confiscation would not add resources to the government but would subtract resources from non-governmental civilians. When effective weapons such as guns are confiscated, the government's power rises relative to that of the civilian population, given that only civilians seem to be the target of proposed gun confiscation legislation. The police and military will obviously always have firearms--as will criminals. In the feudal system, only the noble lords had weapons, as did invaders--with the peasants being helplessly caught in the middle. Gun grabbing moves us closer to this dynamic, with the modern-day invaders being terrorists and criminals the peasants being law-abiding American civilians, and the lords being DHS. The difference is that, in feudal times, there often was a legitimate threat of serious invasion, so the noble knights often served a purpose. The chances of suffering a terrorist attack in America were very slim before 9/11 and have been very slim after that day.

Infringing upon the second amendment may not be much of a concern for some. As long as we have a benevolent government, some may argue, gun grabbing from civilians should pose no serious problem. But what if the government stops being benevolent, what would bring this about, and is it happening now?

Further failure of democracy is needed to initiate a really tyrannical dictatorship that would reign in an environment where guns had been confiscated, where helpless citizens were that much more vulnerable. But beside the Democrat-Republican quid pro quo exchange that happens when D's and R's exchange welfare and warfare, is democracy failing in other ways?

Yes:
1. Inherently, as democracy favors the general consensus and scorns unorganized minorities such as Amishmen who sell raw milk or mothers who refuse to medicate their children with state-mandated drugs. Within the political parties, people with new or differing ideas are often shunned or excluded.

2. Exogenously, as democracy erodes due to a misinformative corporate media and a panem et circensus mentality among the public. For example, FOX News is obsessed with warmongering and airing insignificant tidbits of Republican propaganda.** Entertainment outlets such as "Dancing with the Stars" and NFL football are consuming people's time and consciousness that they might otherwise have leftover to discuss politics.
The pieces in place so far are: not enough leisure time to devote to politics resulting in faltering democracy setting the stage for gun confiscation to weaken citizenry and to become perilous amid a tyrannical government being empowered by the DHS. But remember, in our conjecture, we have yet to address the fact that Americans presently have a lot of wealth and leisure.

The loss of wealth for most voters is happening as follows: In the present, big corporations benefit from deficit spending as they receive government contracts. In the long-run, big banks benefit from deficit spending as they reap the interest on loans the government borrowed in order to run deficits. Eventually, if taxes are raised, the super rich will offshore their funds, and big companies will continue to find ways to avoid paying them, leaving the tax system less progressive--even regressive, and heaped on the moderately rich who will have to forgo creating jobs for the middle class and poor.

As for loss of leisure, mortgages pushed by the federal government's HUD and backed by Fannie, Freddie, and ultimately the Federal Reserve, effectively enslave many Americans to years of serfdom to their homes. Moreover, for people of average education, it takes both parents working for the family to live comfortably. Even when there is leisure, it is often of the mindless sort; ie watching Dancing with the Stars or sports. People spend many hours in transit from their suburban residences to their urban places of employment. The calm leisure necessary to become wise about politics may not be there, and eventually political involvement for many has become a passtime, too abstracted from people's actual lives.

Even if political involvement isn't abstracted, then (in most political cases) it might as well be, because people try to live off the government stealing from everyone else--and people of all income levels do this: the mega-rich by securing federal contracts, the regular rich with local government favors, the middle class with "free" healthcare, and the poor with everything.

Therefore, functional leisure in the sense that it would be used to combat tyranny is not widespread and the nature of voting decisions has declines as everyone is too busy getting favors to vote altruistically to do things like balance the budget.

Conclusion
Critics of this analogy might say that the encroachments of DHS coupled with the losses of civilian power do not necessarily entail that we will continue to move toward a feudal system dynamic or that we will ever end up with a feudal system. In that, they are right. But on the obverse, there seems to be nothing yet to suggest that the slide into a feudal system will stop, as long as the trends here mentioned continue. As long as the next generation's voters shrug off their loss of freedom as TSA expands into subways or as civilians' weaponry is taken away, in other words, if their attitude toward incursions is the same as that held by people of the present, then we can say that the conditions for a further slide toward Feudal America remain, given that DHS has the economic incentive to grow and college-educated people continue to call for gun bans.

One concession to make is that under the feudal system there was little trade and nearly no use of money. Americans have many ways to trade, even if the dollar collapses. The dollar probably won't collapse soon since people are so used to using it as money and since it is highly demanded around the world. We have a complex market economy that was alien to the feudal manor. So obviously we'll probably never reach an environment very much like the feudal system. But moving closer to feudalism is in and of itself a bad thing composed of individual losses of liberty. The problem is that our system is beginning to take on, however slightly, the negative traits of the feudal system.
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*Because the chances of death via a terrorist attack are so small, there is probably no justification for any marginal spending increases for DHS.
**FOX News represents the warmongering, pro-DHS, hero-worship side of the GOP, but does not really stand up for fiscal or social conservatives.

Supporting Ron Paul is Kosher

Despite what some would call Ron Paul's Israel Problem, one website, Americans for Israel, maintains that Ron Paul is the most pro-Israel presidential candidate although he supports cutting aid to Israel because he also supports cutting aid to Israel's surrounding Islamic rivals who altogether receive three times what Israel does.

The website itself seems a bit sparse though--and was probably created in 2008 for the specific purpose of drawing pro-Israel people to Ron Paul. Therefore this is not some well-known pro-Israel group that naturally decided to endorse Ron Paul. Nonetheless, there appears to be some support among presumably, predominantly pro-Israel Jews for Paul, with one Facebook group having 154 members on the day this was published.

The website also claims that withdrawing aid from Israel would allow it more reign in protecting itself from aggressors--without having to ask permission from the US.

The real question is whether tentative support from a US president is the only thing standing in the way of Islamic countries ganging up on and attacking Israel. Would Ron Paul have to pledge an alliance with Israel in order to deter a large-scale attack? Possibly not, since Israel has nukes galore.

Whether the viewpoints expressed by Americans for Israel make sense in light of these questions is for the analysts to decide, but said viewpoints nevertheless are thought provoking.

UPDATE 6-4-11
Walter Block has posted a neat summary of the benefits Ron Paul's policy of no foreign aid would bring to the state of Israel. The question is whether they make up for the loss in benefits from foreign aid.

One thing is for certain: unless Ron Paul can appeal to evangelical Christians who comprise the majority of the Christian Right, then he will be very limited in the primaries.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Thoughts on May 21 Rapture Date

Radio host Harold Camping predicts that judgement day, the rapture, will occur May 21, 2011 at 6:00pm. It will strike when that hour reaches your time zone. Harold Camping claims his analysis of Revelation is evidence for this doomsday date.

The question to ask is why people want to believe that the rapture will happen May 21. Maybe they don't like the way the culture is going, or how the churches are becoming; indeed Camping himself asserts that the churches have been taken over by Satan: his assertions sometimes seem not too far off. But to say that all churches have been taken over bespeaks quite a lot of knowledge held by speaker...

Anyway, we don't claim to know when the rapture is--May 21 or otherwise, so we decided to publish a litany of opinions on the issue.

Setting a date for the rapture means that people will continue to sin until a couple days or hours before the predicted time or date when they will get right with God. Setting a date incentivizes sin, and therefore it is better to believe that the rapture will happen any time. Any proclamation that incentivizes sin is a false one.

Wouldn't it be funny if the rapture happened May 20th?

I hope the rapture happens May 21. My life's miserable.

Is the rapture even biblical?

This man is using an ancient document that isn't exactly meant to be taken literally when it comes to dates and figures to predict when the world will end.

Starlight proves that the universe is older than 13,023 years old but Camping claims this is universe's age. Thus, his assumptions concerning the validity of time span in the Bible are based on falsehood.

This is another example of religion misleading people.

I want the rapture to hold off until I have a chance to get married.
Regardless, we think you should be ready May 21, as you would any other date...but maybe a little more so on May 21.

Monday, May 2, 2011

NATO Bombs Children

Rather than send aid to Japan, the US government via NATO bombs mentally challenged children in Libya.
NATO pilots [performed] an airstrike that took out the Libyan Down's Syndrome Society, a school for children afflicted with the birth disorder.
Continue reading on Examiner.com: NATO airstrike in Libya hits school for disabled children - National Libertarian