An Unfinished Work

The other day I had a brief exchange with a high school classmate.  He observed we were probably on different sides of the political spectrum.  As is almost always the case this gave me something to consider both about myself and the political spectrum.

Let’s start with the political spectrum.

When I was young there were two dominant parties in the American political system.  Today there are still two dominant parties, but things have changed dramatically in the form those two parties take.  When I first became aware of the two-party system, I found the following truths.  Each party had a mixture of beliefs. There were socially liberal Republicans and socially conservative Democrats.  There were financially responsible liberals and financially responsible conservatives.  Racism existed in both parties, although the racism of the northeast was better masked than the racism of the south.  At the time members of both parties could find common ground to work with like-minded individuals on the other side.  Democrats made up the majority parties in the Southern states and Republicans were the clear minority.  Cities around the country were run by “political machines” where the Democrats excelled at getting out the vote for their candidates.  Republicans have always been the minority party and would only win by capturing the “swing” or independent vote.

Over the years, and I blame the media for this, the parties changed.  As each party moved to occupy spaces the other party abandoned, we’ve become a two-party system of the extremes.  Perhaps it is unfair to blame just the media because in my opinion the primary system should also be held responsible. With the adoption of the primaries the people nominated are the most politically vocal and play to the activists on the fringe.  Is this better than the party bosses getting together in the smoke-filled back rooms and finding the best compromise candidate?  Although if the DNC process in 2016 and 2020 is any indication the primaries are really just a sham as the power brokers really do still decide who their candidate for President will be.

Today, as I look at the two parties’ somethings become crystal clear for me.  The first is classic liberalism no longer exists in either party.  In the Republican party, it was pushed out by a shift to political activists from the southern religious groups abandoned by the Democrats.  For the Democrats, although they still use the term liberal it no longer means liberal in the classic sense of tolerance for opposing views.  It is self-righteous liberalism where only progressives know what is right for the nation as a whole.

The idea of fiscal responsibility with our federal spending has also gone the way of gas-guzzling muscle cars of the 1960s.  It is claimed Senator Everett Dirksen, the late Senator from Illinois, once said, “A billion dollars here and a billion dollars there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”  Today Congress has no problem spending trillions of dollars without blinking an eye.  Unfortunately, for the nation, a very large percentage of the money they are happy to spend is money we have to borrow from someone.  We never seem to worry anymore about how we will pay that back.  We have Democrats talking about universal health care, expanding welfare, eliminating our use of fossil fuels, and forgiving college debt, while the Republicans complain about it but then when given an opportunity do little to balance our needs and moderate the cost of defense spending.  From 2010 to 2021 our excess spending averaged a little over $641 billion a year and now stands at over $30 trillion for the national debt.  The interest payments alone are eating significantly into our ability to provide the fundamental services Americans expect and need: things like infrastructure with safe water, clean air, and good roads. 

I grew up near the home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.  In and near Hyde Park, New York we have the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge across the Hudson River, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Home and Library, Val Kill (where Eleanor lived after Franklin passed), and of course, I went to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School, home of “The Presidents.”  Our discussions of history were filled with how FDR had saved the nation during the great depression.  How his fireside chats calmed and inspired the nation, and how he was the first to recognize the need for a social safety net for the elderly while employing out-of-work artists and entertainers to help with the building of monumental works like the Hoover Damn.  That last thing is something all Democrats continually bring up to show how they care for the poor and elderly.  What doesn’t get discussed too much is how at the end of the day both parties came together to create a plan to sustain this act and voted overwhelmingly to approve.  In the house, the vote was 372 yeas, 33 nays, 2 present, and 25 not voting.  Of the dissenting votes the Democrats had 15 nays, and 20 "not voting," while the Republicans had 15 nays, 4 "not voting", and 2 voting as "present."  The farm labor and progressive parties made up the difference.  In the Senate, there was a similar result with 77 yeas, 6 nays, and 12 "not voting."  That is truly bi-partisan support.

The basic premise for Social Security to work and be sustainable is just like any insurance.  There must be more money coming in than going out.  For over 70-years that has been the case.  The problem we are now facing is a shrinking workforce, paying fewer dollars into the fund than the elderly are drawing out.  In this bipolar world of soundbites and talking points, we seem unable to come to grips with this reality and everyone wants to talk about how they’ve earned their payments and it's now the Republicans' fault some are beginning to point out the fund is running out of money.  Some will talk about how the social security “lockbox” has been raided to pay other bills, but if you think about it this is nonsensical since all the money comes from one source and is backed only by the faith in the nation to pay its bills.  If we were actually backed by some physical standard, you could make that case, but you either have faith the government can pay its bills or you don’t.  That is where I begin to differ from my Democratic friends.

As I pointed out earlier, I grew up in the heartland of the Democratic ideals, but those ideals have changed, and so have I.  I’ve been to or lived in, a fair bit of the world, I’ve seen the richness of western Europe, rebuilt after the last World War by American dollars spent under the Marshall Plan, while also seeing eastern Europe suffer under the disregard and oppression of the Soviet Union.  I’ve seen the far east, rebuilt after the war by American dollars in investments as well as the industry of the people to make their lives and families better.  I’ve been to several islands throughout the Pacific where they have found tourism as an industry, or American bases create a cash income for the citizens.  I’ve seen the middle east where distrust of the Judeo-Christian faith has driven the religious leaders to a more extreme form of Islam than had been previously allowed.  I’ve driven down the streets of Karachi Pakistan where I’ve seen white-clad boys playing cricket behind walls topped with glass shards to keep out the homeless boys and girls standing just outside the gates of the school.  I’ve been north of the Arctic Circle where the only thing there was a radar site to watch for a Soviet attack of the homeland, and south as far as Brazil where I saw a remarkable city cut out of the middle of a rain forest where people lived in gorgeous homes or ramshackle boxes (with nothing in between).  What has amazed me the most in all these travels is the human spirit and a desire to be free from the oppression of government, but at the same time needing the protections of a government just to live the best lives they can.

When I graduated from college I began to think as a fiscal conservative, but I retained a true appreciation of the social programs this country could, and perhaps should provide.  Social Security had, by then, become the accepted standard of how a program should be set up.  The larger working population would take a percentage of their paycheck and give it to the government to care for the elderly.  The only real problem I saw was the idea held by too many that social security wasn’t a “safety net” it was a retirement plan.  This, in my opinion, led them to not save for their future but spend on the things they wanted today.  This was akin to Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper.  Those fables were all supposed to teach us some underlying life lesson, learned from experience.  How many of us actually pay attention to these things, but when given an excuse believe it is someone else’s job to take care of the future.

Our founding fathers, having fought a war to achieve freedom from the English King and having learned the hard lessons of a weak confederation of the separate states determined to write a constitution forming a new government.  Even then some feared a too-powerful government, while others fought to establish the supremacy of such a government. Alexander Hamilton, writing in Federalist Paper 84 argued the Constitution alone was sufficient to protect the nation and the desire for a “Bill of Rights” detailing the specific freedoms of the citizens was unnecessary.  Time has proven the wisdom of those who argued for the necessity of detailing those rights. 

In reflection, does the government taking on more responsibility for our personal welfare improve society, or simply make the government more powerful? We’ve chosen to expand the role of government beyond what even a staunch Federalist such as Hamilton believed was essential. In so doing we must realize that every government decision comes with a cost.  Sometimes those costs are financial, other times those costs are a loss of individual freedoms.  This pandemic has brought into sharp focus the debate of individual freedom versus social responsibility.  At the heart of my concern is the question:  does the expanding government actually enable the mechanisms to teach a shared social responsibility or does it destroy them?

As I’ve aged, some would say I’ve become less compassionate for the poor because I don’t believe the government has actually done a good job caring for them.  The money spent does not, on the whole, seem to have made their lives better.  If we look at the results of government in our Democratic-controlled states and cities, do we find the poor better off today than they were before the creation of the Great Society?  Naturally, those who favor the programs are unwilling to admit the inherent failures.  They can shift the blame of failure to those “other uncompassionate politicians in the GOP” who have the gall to question the cost-benefit of throwing money at the poor to improve their lives.  Do those social safety net programs work, or are they simply another way to make one class of people a slave to the state?

I hear a lot about the disparity between the richest of the rich and the poor in America.  The simple question I ask is has any or all of the government welfare programs closed that gap over the past 55-years?  We routinely hear from the left a complaint about the wealth gap, where statistics like how rich the three richest men in America are compared to the bottom half of the population as if this is something new and disreputable.  They almost always point to the years of Reagan as the point where wealth disparity started.  Since Reagan, we’ve had how many Democratic-controlled Congresses, and how many Democratic Presidents.  Each and every one of those individuals or groups had an opportunity to alter the path of divergence of wealth but chose not to.  We complain about Reagan, yet no one questions the wealth acquisition of our politicians who enter government with little and leave as multi-millionaires (e.g., Biden, Pelosi, Obama, and pick as many offsetting Republicans as you need). 

I’ve written about this in the past, here is what drives me to my conservative views and how I find the liberal/progressive movement out of touch with what I think is critical to the survival of our nation.

I believe a social safety net is a grand idea, I believe universal health care is good, and I believe universal employment is a wonderful goal.  Where I begin to diverge from historically liberal thought is who is best served by a safety net, how its benefits are measured.  What does universal health care get us and is it affordable?  Finally, how do you achieve universal employment when people don't want to work?  

Unfortunately, as I look at the history of the past 70 years, our government is incapable of creating all these things without destroying families, moral values, and creating a debt load that will destroy the nation.  The welfare state actually destroys the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs because it places the burden of achievement on individuals who really don’t care about humanity, they are only doing their job spending someone else’s money.

As I noted earlier how do individuals deal with welfare and other safety concerns?  The programs of the Great Society seem, upon reflection, to have destroyed the very fabric of the African-American society.  We have more single-mother families whose children grow, not to great success, but to greater crime and poverty.  We no longer expect our poorest to pay income taxes, but we steal their wealth with sales taxes and poor education so they are unable to break the chains the government and society, in general, have placed around them.  What government program will change this reality?  I believe change can only come from within and unfortunately, we are teaching our young to be victims, not champions.  To have ever greater expectations of government and fewer expectations of themselves?

Has affirmative action actually improved the lives of those it was supposed to help with a step up or has it lowered the credibility of the education system by lowering the expectations of those who compete within it? I don’t know but in looking at the racism of the colleges I’m not sure it has helped achieve the equality it was supposed to.  If it had, would we still be hearing about how systemically racist America is?  Having been to parts of the world where racism is alive and well, I find these claims of Americans being horridly racist uninformed about the world we are a part of.  Go to Japan if you want to see racism.  Go to China, India, or South Africa.

Universal health care is a wonderful idea, but if we implemented it how would it be administered?  Would we expect the government to have an over-abundance of capability, or would we see the empty shelves of medical supplies we see today in our retail markets?  When the Affordable Care Act was passed the government promised it would be wonderful for all.  Its opponents questioned the costs and we’ve seen those costs actually occur.  The supporters said there would not be government panels that would question the decisions of the doctors, but the Pandemic has shown us that government experts only look at a limited data set in making their choices.  Will our care be the envy of the world, or would it be akin to the United Kingdom where the rich can travel to the U.S. for the care, they desire versus the care the government provides, or as we sink into pure socialism will we become like Venezuela or Cuba?  This is the question I have for those who wish to spend dollars we don’t have.  Do the people who believe in the inequality of wealth believe taking 100% of that wealth from them would actually create a viable and sustainable health care plan?  Wasn’t Medicare and Medicaid supposed to do that when they were created?  What have they achieved besides increasing health care costs at a rate above annual inflation?

The thing about the progressive mindset is the belief they know what utopia is, and how to reach it.  I question that “one size fits all” utopian belief, and I believe history has shown us the zealots of progressivism have actually done more harm than good in their pursuit of the perfect world.  We make a big deal about the Nazis, but at the time they were a progressive movement.  We talk about Margaret Sanger as if she was the ultimate feminist, but so easily dismiss her racism and her desire to eliminate the unacceptable from society with universal abortion.

That said, if we were only to concern ourselves with tradition, we would still be driving horse-drawn carriages.  There must be a balance, unfortunately, we seem to have lost that ability to compromise for the common good.  They say the pendulum swings both ways, and perhaps it is beginning to swing back towards a more common view on what is good for America, but unless we find a way to talk, understand and accept opposing views, and work toward compromise we will remain a nation in turmoil  Both the nation and I are certainly an unfinished work.

Curiouser and Curiouser - Thoughts on 9/11

So many thoughts swirl through my mind as I watch the world unfold before me this week.  A week when we remember the horror of September 11th, 2001. The media will talk about how we came together and how those whose lives were changed forever by the brutality of a few who hated America.  

We have four grandkids visiting us for the next few weeks as their dad starts a new job in North Carolina, and their mom and older sisters put their home on the market so they can all move to North Carolina.

Phrases from my education come to mind as we end the Long-War in Afghanistan.

First, from Abraham Lincoln: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

No matter how poorly the administration executed the withdrawal from Afghanistan the men and women who committed their lives, and their family’s wellbeing should long be remembered.  These men and women went into harm’s way to fight a war without end because the politicians who sent them and the generals who led them had no clear vision of what victory was supposed to look like. 

Of course, we can’t leave this section without acknowledging their role as citizens, with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

Now we turn to the long-pandemic.  A virus, in all probability, created by the Chinese Communists and let loose on the world from Wuhan China.  It is now just another political tool used by the media and the politicians to gain greater control of the individuals they are supposed to be working for.  There are questions about masks, vaccines, booster vaccines, and government mandates/laws to restrict individual choice, under the guise of communal safety.  

On some show the other night Geraldo Rivera, in supporting the President’s statements regarding the end of his patience with those who remain unvaccinated he captured what seems the be the position of most liberals.  It is the government and everyone else’s responsibility to keep him and his family safe.  The world is too complex to ask a father to do what fathers have traditionally done.  Those roles must be taken over by the government.  

From Leon Trotsky: “The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” – that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters.”

As I look at our society, Lyndon Johnson and the other “New Deal” democrats coming out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era accomplished what Trotsky could only hope for with their creation of the “Great Society.” A society where people were told the state would care for them and the traditions that held a people together were no longer necessary.

In this long-pandemic our government has a new tool, ideally suited, for the social engineering so many in the Democratic party wish to implement.  A utopian society where no one ever has to work, and no one ever questions the purpose of government.  Where all things are provided, and no government program ever ends.  Government expands until all things are run by the elite billionaires and their political Want-to-Be’s.

Thomas Jefferson said: “Educate the whole mass of people. They are the only sure reliance on the preservation of our liberty.”  

From all appearances we’ve failed miserably in meeting that goal.  We’ve allowed teachers to transition from teaching to indoctrination.  Today we wrestle not with the periodic table, but with who can have periods.  We teach a new math where how much change should be get back from using a $5.00 piece of paper for a $4.75 bill requires a digital computer rather than a human brain.  Pronouns used to be important to replace actual nouns, now they are only important so a 4-year-old choose its sexual preference in pre-school.  Liberals used to complain we were falling behind the rest of the world, and would cite homogenous countries like Finland as the example to follow, while supporting the teacher unions who want more money to pass along people who don’t learn because the government is here to care for them, or families have been replaced by gangs as the vehicle for teaching our young social standards of behavior.

Recently there was an interesting observation by Bill Maher, and entertainment personality I don’t normally have much use for.  When asked why all the sudden conservative comics are becoming popular, he noted it was because liberals, who he believes are normally more rational than conservatives have changed.

In his words: “I keep saying to the liberals: you know what, if what you’re doing sounds like an ‘Onion’ headline…stop. A lot of this stuff that goes on the left now, it’s, you know, ‘Seattle Votes to Decriminalize Crime. Three-Year-Old Pick Their Own Gender’ is an ‘Onion’ headline. When you tear down statues of Abraham Lincoln in the Land of Lincoln – ‘Land of Lincoln Cancels Lincoln’ – it’s an ‘Onion’ headline.”  

This move to the extreme has created a new industry to mock the foolishness of the left.  It doesn’t matter if it is “Drag Queen Story Hour” pushed by public librarians, or the attempts to normalize the lives of violent felons while vilifying the police.  Each step is another step down the path Alice followed as she looked beyond the mirror. 

The funny thing about this movement is not that it is led by radical youth, but it is supported by the supposed adults who are charged with running our businesses and our country.  We’ve spent so much energy claiming that the 25-45 years old people are the “key” demographic that now everyone believes they have the wisdom to make rational choices.  It is almost as if we’ve forgotten the foibles of humanity and how people will always act in their own perceived self-interest.

Society, and the lives that make it up, becomes curiouser and curiouser each day.

The Party of Free

The Democratic Party’s Presidential candidates are almost tripping over themselves with promises of free stuff for the people.  This week Bernie has come up with a plan to tax investors (individuals and investment fund managers both large and small) so they can offer “free” education to those who want it, eliminating the problem of student debt.  Of course, Bernie doesn’t frame the tax as something paid by the average person, it will be paid by all those “greedy guys” on Wall Street.

To support him, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has weighed in to show how someone was accepted to her “dream college” but actually had to pay for it herself, and now has about $240,000 in student debt.

These two positions by prominent advocates for socialism raise two questions for me.  The first, why should someone go to college and incur debt with no plan to repay it?  The second, what happens to individual incentive when everything is free?

President Eisenhower, in his Fair Well address to the nation, warned of the Military-Industrial complex we had created with World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War and how their growing power was influencing government spending.  I think the same could be said for the Education is Mandatory Complex.  The cost of secondary education in the US has far outpaced the inflation rate due to the growth of colleges into mega-institutions of political indoctrination.   

When I graduated from high school, my mother had conditioned me that I would go to college for the better life it offered.  I wanted to be a flyer in the Air Force and to get to that point I needed a college degree, so both Mom and I had mutually supported goals.  At the time I went, there were tens of thousands of young men who were going for other reasons, many young men went to avoid the draft and the likelihood of war in Vietnam, others went to find themselves, still, others just to get away from home.  All were promised a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  The colleges offered the opportunity for good jobs and career advancement over peers who had not gone.  That was pretty much a lie then, and it remains so now.  What the right colleges offered was tremendous networking opportunities, and an entryway to further education if you chose.

Fortunately for me, when I went to school the cost of even a private college like I attended was still within the realm of affordability.  I chose a path that got me through and commissioned into the Air Force so I guess you could say I was a success.  But I know several friends who spent four to six years hiding from the draft only to leave and find work as machinists, landscapers, and woodworkers.  Was college really that important to what they wanted for their careers?  By the way, does everyone have a career or do most just have jobs?

Today we have a bloated industry full of self-righteous professionals making six-figure salaries while telling us they are invaluable and we, the rest of the nation, should pay our fair share so they can continue to grow their mega-universities.  Are their arguments all that different than the televangelists who promise God’s salvation if we would just send them a monthly donation of say $50?

Should I feel bad that a girl went to her “dream university” when her parents couldn’t afford it, and her performance didn’t warrant any scholarship offers?  Sorry, I don’t.  The reality: there is a cost to making bad choices, outrageous student debt seems to be one of those costs.

Now let’s talk about what happens to human incentive when everything is free.  First and foremost, who can point out a successful human endeavor that was accomplished without a cost?  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

While I’m waiting I’ll just point out that free housing to the homeless has not solved homelessness.  Free money to the poor has not, for the most part, brought them out of poverty.  Free K-12 education has not eliminated illiteracy.  All the social safety nets we’ve built in this country has not eliminated crime.  Grand (free) mental institutions to house the insane has not made the problems of insanity less problematic.  Oh yes, none of these free things were actually free.  Someone had to pay for them, who was that again?

A story from my childhood education seems relevant here.

There once was a poor immigrant who arrived in America virtually penniless.  He got a job rowing boat in New York City.  He scrimped and saved his meager salary until he could buy his own rowboat to carry people between Manhattan and Staten Island.  It’s a rather long story but it ends with his becoming one of the richest men in the world.  To me, that is the American Dream.  Not the idea that people with money should give it to people who don’t so they can have free stuff.

Is Space Really the Final Frontier?

The opening line to Star Trek seems a good place to start as we consider our future.  The hopes and humanity depicted by Gene Rodenberry in his 1960s classic, and the franchise that followed is inspiring.  In his model of the Federation he shows the alpha life forms of a whole variety of planets working together for the greater good, but! 

For a story to be interesting it needs to have characters in conflict, for without some form of conflict where is the interest?  Just like the old westerns, there are the good guys, bad guys, and a reason for them to be at odds with each other.  Star Trek followed this classic format just like all great stories.  But life does not usually mirror art, so I have to wonder will we arrive at a point in our humanity where we emulate the grandness of the Federation?  Where we are always the good guys and the distinction between good and evil is simple and clear-cut.

There are those who see a unified earth with a benevolent central government seeking what is best for all humankind.  They are the same people who thought European nationalism led to the conflicts of the great world wars.  At the same time, there are those who look at the darker nature of humankind and see the almost unlimited power such an organization would have as being incredibly dangerous to the rights of an individual.  Those who argue for a strong world government are the same progressive visionaries who set out to create that organization, and thus end what they viewed as a central cause of war, namely the nationalism that led to empire building in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  After the first World War and then again after the second they created first with the League of Nations and then with the United Nations, a building block to end the rush to war, but something has gone awry. 

War has not ended, and at least for me, it is still next to impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys here on our little planet.  The good guys and bad guys are all a matter of perspective.  Didn’t the Klingons view themselves as the good guys, ultimately siding with the Federation as they battled those other bad guys the Romulans?

We see in the liberal-progressive movement the supposedly grand ideas about the better nature of mankind, but also a deep intolerance to anyone who doesn’t buy into those ideas.  (It is almost as if all the liberals suffer from the same human failings as those wayward conservatives.)  At the heart of the approach is how a government is responsible for the making life great for those who can’t make their own lives great.  It is, in a funny kind of way, interesting the historical definition of liberal has been altered to reflect the current intolerance to competing approaches to government.

In all the discussion of bigger government what I never see is an answer on how large it will need to be to overcome the human frailties of intolerance, self-interest, racism, and greed.  Nor do I see any discussion (other than tax the rich) on where the funds for this endeavor will really come from.  By the way, how much did it cost the Federation to create its fleet of starships to defend the empire?  Who actually bore the cost of that endeavor?  In the telling of Star Trek, I don’t think Gene actually laid out the financial structure that made money obsolete, but certainly not all planets were created equal from a natural resource standpoint, were they?  Were all those other “unnamed” members of the Federation expected to ante up the same amount as Earth, after all, we got to be in charge and only a few of them got to serve on the Federation starships?  Obviously, they had their own vessels but you never see them called to save the outposts near the neutral zone, do you? 

In looking at the society we’ve become -- I wonder if we are taking our ideas of society from the fictional stories we’ve grown up watching.  When we take our ideas of social utopia from fiction I wonder how much of human nature we are willing to ignore before it all comes crashing down from the reality of that nature?  After all, Karl Marx saw a worker’s paradise in the form of Communism, but the reality of the Soviet Union presented a far bleaker life for almost everyone not at the top of the political food chain.

A Few Thoughts on Easy Versus Hard (Part 2)

What happens when entitlement meets reality?

Entitlement is an interesting word.  The dictionary provides two distinct meanings.  First, it is the state or condition of being entitled, the second is a government program providing benefits to members of a specified group.

Let’s briefly consider the second definition first, “government programs providing benefits to members of specified groups.”  The very first government entitlement programs were created in response to civil unrest and protests of veteran groups after the civil war.  They got a big boost with the social security “safety net” set up by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the depression era Congress.  The theory behind Social Security was the government would collect far more in taxes than it paid out and the trust fund would be self-sustaining forever (that was the theory).  It assumed there would always be more workers than annuitants.  A look at the current projections for our society show that assumption is no longer valid and there will soon be far fewer young people paying into the program than people collecting benefits.  These “must pay” entitlement programs now account for roughly 60 percent of the annual budget.  Social Security and Medicare make up a little over 50 percent of that expense.  We hear a lot about how the Social Security Trust fund has been raided, but my research shows that is not exactly true.  The “trust fund” can only invest its funds in programs that are guaranteed by the U.S. government.  The problem is we will soon run out of tax dollars to pay off the investments made in the government by the government itself.  The question is what will happen when we reach that point?  Who will be left holding the bag?

Now we come to the issue of who is entitled?  As a nation we had historically bought into the idea of “American Exceptionalism.”  Whether it was right or wrong to think we were exceptional seems to be one of the core elements of our on-going social debate.  I believe the sense of being exceptional pushes us to achieve as a society, sometimes in remarkable ways.  The young are now taught we are not exceptional, in fact, there are those who teach we are not exceptional and our arrogance has made us the villain.  It seems to me along the lines of this change comes the idea that government is there to solve our problems for us.  That has been the mantra for the progressive left since the fall of the stock market in 1929.  With the best intentions we have created social programs and safety nets but it seems in so doing we have changed the spirit of our upcoming generations from expecting greatness awaits them if they have the courage to apply themselves to accepting that tomorrow won’t be brighter than today.  We seem to have instilled a sense that they are “owed” a life free from all the things that stress us, and the government is solely responsible for their well-being and happiness.  It is an unfortunate testament to that faith that the government so grossly failed in its job during the recent school massacre. 

The question before us though is who is responsible for this dramatic shift in our individual, national and world view?  I believe the answer is unfortunately quite simple, the blame lies with the baby boomer generation.  My generation.  We are the children of a generation who knew abject poverty, where work was hard and often dangerous, and who fought a war where the entire industrial might of the nation was focused on war goods production, and civilian goods were sacrificed.  But they came from parents who for the vast majority shared a faith in family and independence.  They came out of that experience vowing to make life better for their children, and they did. 

What we saw in our parents though was the stresses of this new America beginning to take its toll.  Divorce, once rare and unthinkable, began to increase, and the laws were changed to make it easier for that was what they wanted.  Alcohol and drug addiction began to rise, along with the domestic violence that often comes with people out of control in the emotional state.  Mass migration and loss of the extended families was another theme during the years of our youth.  In search of the better job, the better climate, or the better community people moved at rates unseen for a number of generations.  All these issues reflected the beginnings of what has become a disposable society.

Most of us grew up without too much concern about our daily survival, although racism and poverty still deeply affected a sizeable and significant number of families, especially in Appalachia and the South.  For many of my generation, we would be the first in our families to go to colleges and universities to realize the dream of a greater life.  The big decisions in our youth were what color bike we wanted or should our baseball glove have five or six fingers.

We came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, a time not unlike today, where protest and pressure for social change was overwhelming.  Young men fled to Canada to avoid being drafted into the services engaged fighting a war in a country many Americans could not pick out on a map.  Those who could afford to found ways to avoid the draft either through remaining in college or through political influence with their local draft boards.  Eventually civil protest, and extreme violence by radicals led President Johnson to retire.  His replacement, President Nixon promised to end the war, but it took him well into his second term to keep that promise.

Meanwhile the blacks of the nation were engaged in another type of war where they fought for an equality that had long been denied them.  The government responded with new laws and new social programs to help lift them up from the oppression they had so long experienced.  What the government could not do was change the hearts and minds of those who had grown up with a view whites and blacks were not equal.  But, the social engineers of the time said we could put preferential treatment programs in place as a way to overcome those biases and the bigotry that existed.  I believe this was the beginning of the class conflicts we see today where equality is no longer the desired end state.

The drama of those decades is captured in the changes even in our music.  Big Bands were replaced by electric quartets, soulful love songs replaced by talk of free love and free drugs.  Our parents condemned this new “Rock and Roll” as so much noise, while we abandoned those classic orchestrations of their generation.  Perhaps in our search for our own identity, we fueled the conflict and exasperated the social change.

As I look at my generation we have bought into the idea when something breaks we throw it away and get something newer and better.  While this sounds good for things like televisions or refrigerators we have carried the concept into all aspects of our lives and our society.  Marriage is good, as long as it is convenient to remain married.  Fidelity is nice but not that important.  Babies should only be born if it is not too much of a burden.  Large families are expensive and should be avoided.  Focusing on our children should not interfere with our work or social lives.  The list goes on.

We became a generation that believed the “experts” know everything and if we would only listen to them life would be great.  As a result, we now have these “experts” on mass media telling us how to fix our lives and dispose of those things that bother us.  We have “experts” telling us how the climate is changing, how bad men are, how evil history is, and a thousand other things from micro aggression to the appropriate pronouns to use in every social setting.  We stopped thinking for ourselves and began telling our children to just listen to the experts, but somewhere along the line, we have chosen that vilification of opposing views was okay.

(to be continued)

A Ponzi only Bigger

What is the difference between social security and a Ponzi scheme? This past week while I've beeen on vacation, away from the daily news I've been wondering about this. We vilify the Bernie Madoff's of the world for living the highlife with other peoples money until one day the bills come due and they are found out. They survive for years by paying the initial investors with funds deposited by the new ones. For at least the last thirty years, some have been warning of a day when the SS fund will be paying out more than it takes in as baby boomers flood into the payout phase and our children don't replace us as investors, either because they fewer, already on the government dole, or moving from temporary job to temporary job. So who should we hold accountable for this?

It’s a New Year, But Has Anything Changed?

USA Today, Opinion Column: Black public servants bear brunt of cuts.

This column, in USA Today, is unfortunately indicative of our inability to talk or debate any subject without bringing the matter of race immediately to the forefront.  With it comes the question of expectations and legitimacy.  Dr. Julianne Malveaux, as president of “a small, private, historically Black liberal arts college for women” clearly has a social and political agenda to push.  She makes the statement that Black citizens will bear the brunt of layoffs when federal and state governments when they begin the inevitable process of downsizing.  To me that means these layoffs will push more Blacks out of work than non-Blacks.  Yet her numbers do not support her supposition. 

Perhaps as an economist she is trained to ignore the obvious and see deeper meaning in the math, or perhaps there are facts not in evidence in the article that she attempts to convey.  For example, she talks of the financial difficulties of the Post Office and its need to close offices and terminate 100,000 employees.  She then says 21% of the workforce is Black.  Taken at face value those two statements suggest that 21,000 (more or less) Black employees should be laid off, if the layoffs are non-discriminatory.  That would leave 79,000 (more or less) non-Black workers laid off.  I don’t see the brunt of layoffs being carried by the Blacks here, unless there is some other determinant, for example the layoffs and closing will come in areas that are predominately minority areas where a larger percentage of the workforce is Black.  That qualifier is never discussed.

When talking of the public sector workforce she outlines how a greater percentage of Blacks then non-Blacks have entered that force because earnings and advancement opportunities are greater than in the private sector for them.  Why is that?  Is it because there is little competition for advancement in the public sector, and once you have your job historically you are not likely to loose it, or since the organization is not profit driven it will maintain all workers, not just those who strive to excel? 

At what point do we focus on building a strong economy and not using the government to further experiments in social engineering?  At what point do we hold all citizens equal with the same rights and entitlements?  When does race become not the focus of our social arguments but a reason to celebrate our individual heritage and diversity? 

The Entitled

We have become a nation of entitled.  I think this began with the creation of social security and the belief the government had to provide a national retirement system and safety net for the elderly.  Shifting the burden of care from the family to the state.  From there it was a simple leap to create social welfare for the unemployed and the unemployment compensation for those who’ve lost their jobs and are in temporary need.  Each of these is arguably a good thing and something a socialist country does to maintain its hold on the people and legitimize its role.

When the nation is populated by young people earning a living and paying taxes the system can work, but as the workforce ages, and the ratio of those paying in to those drawing out decreases there is an inevitable tipping point where the system must fail.  Couple this with a large segment of the population that has grown up believing they need not work or pay taxes and we accelerate towards that tipping point.  

Tie in the social system that says if you don’t earn sufficient dollars you not only don’t pay taxes but the government owes you an earned income credit, how can we not believe we are entitled to whatever we want?

Finally, create a tax system that is so labyrinth in its rules and regulations that if you can afford a good accountant you need not pay any taxes.  Once you accomplish this you have a financial system that mirrors the US. 

If you made over $33,000.oo in 2008 you were in the top half of all wage earners in the US.  This half of the population paid 97.3% of all the personnel income taxes collected.  The other 50% paid the remaining 2.7% or collected from the top half, because they were entitled.

Somehow our elected representatives and senators see nothing wrong in this structure, and wonder aloud about the radical Tea Party movement.

The Great Society -- So What Happened?

Growing up in the 60’s you could not escape the issue of race.  It was on the news every night.  Living in a suburban county along the Hudson River we were able to sit back with the smug reassurance it was those other white’s that were the problem.  The rednecks of the South were still fighting the civil war and holding the blacks down.

While this may have been a comforting illusion I now know racism in the North was every bit as prevalent and cancerous, it was just more insidious in the social framework.  It has now been 45 years since the freedom march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama, yet race inequity seems as central today as it did back then.  

Back then, led by Dr. King, the southern blacks struggled for equality in participation.  Today, even here in lower Alabama (actually West Florida) blacks have full equality in government participation.  The problem is most choose not to participate unless there is come specific cause or candidate they can relate to.  This choice condemns us all to a segregated nation, where only the extremist voices are heard.

Back then, family was important to their survival in the South, and certainly much more so than in the urban areas.  Today family appears to be generally defined as a single mother and children.  The absentee father is, unfortunately, far too common to all those living on the poverty line, and it is in fact glamorized on TV and in the movies.   I wonder what will be the long term social impact on our society from this evolution away from a stable family group.

Back then, Lyndon Baines Johnson and the majority Democratic Congress, attempted to restructure America to meet their vision of what America should be like.  To make the shining light, the utopian world that every progressive thinks they can make.  I would like to  review the LBJ's April 1964 speech at the University of Michigan where he outlined his vision and see where we are today.

President Hatcher, Governor Romney, Senators McNamara and Hart, Congressmen Meader and Staebler, and other members of the fine Michigan delegation, members of the graduating class, my fellow Americans:

It is a great pleasure to be here today. This university has been coeducational since 1870, but I do not believe it was on the basis of your accomplishments that a Detroit high school girl said, "In choosing a college, you first have to decide whether you want a coeducational school or an educational school."

Well, we can find both here at Michigan, although perhaps at different hours.

I came out here today very anxious to meet the Michigan student whose father told a friend of mine that his son’s education had been a real value. It stopped his mother from bragging about him.

I have come today from the turmoil of your Capital to the tranquility of your campus to speak about the future of your country.

The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation.

For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people.

The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.

Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the Great Society - in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.

Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans-four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, highways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must re-build the entire urban United States.

Aristotle said: "Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life." It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today.

The catalog of ills is long: there is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated.

Worst of all expansion is eroding the precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference.

Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not beyond their borders.

New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your generation to make the American city a place where future generations will come, not only to live but to live the good life.

I understand that if I stayed here tonight I would see that Michigan students are really doing their best to live the good life.

This is the place where the Peace Corps was started. It is inspiring to see how all of you, while you are in this country, are trying so hard to live at the level of the people.

A second place where we begin to build the Great Society is in our countryside. We have always prided ourselves on being not only America the strong and America the free, but America the beautiful. Today that beauty is in danger. The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded, our seashores overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing.

A few years ago we were greatly concerned about the "Ugly American." Today we must act to prevent an ugly America.

For once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.

A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of America. There your children’s lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal.

Today, 8 million adult Americans, more than the entire population of Michigan, have not finished 5 years of school. Nearly 20 million have not finished 8 years of school. Nearly 54 million-more than one quarter of all America-have not even finished high school.

Each year more than 100,000 high school graduates, with proved ability, do not enter college because they cannot afford it. And if we cannot educate today’s youth, what will we do in 1970 when elementary school enrollment will be 5 million greater than 1960? And high school enrollment will rise by 5 million. College enrollment will increase by more than 3 million.

In many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are outdated. Most of our qualified teachers are underpaid, and many of our paid teachers are unqualified. So we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. This means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.

These are three of the central issues of the Great Society. While our Government has many programs directed at those issues, I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems.

But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings-on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.

The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program in Washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained resources of local authority. They require us to create new concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities.

Woodrow Wilson once wrote: "Every man sent out from his university should be a man of his Nation as well as a man of his time."

Within your lifetime powerful forces, already loosed, will take us toward a way of life beyond the realm of our experience, almost beyond the bounds of our imagination.

For better or for worse, your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.

So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?

Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?

Will you join in the battle to make it possible for all nations to live in enduring peace-as neighbors and not as mortal enemies?

Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?

There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.

Those who came to this land sought to build more than just a new country. They sought a new world. So I have come here today to your campus to say that you can make their vision our reality. So let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say: It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life.

Thank you. Good-bye.

On the surface this is a wonderful vision, crafted by skilled speech writers who attempt to provide the same inspiration they did when they were writing for John F. Kennedy.  So, where do we stand 45 years later?  Have we moved toward that utopian world LBJ laid out, have we rebuilt our cities, have we raised our collective education, have we set aside vast lands for nature, and most importantly have we erased the racial injustice he promised?  

Lets start with our Cities... Clearly we have not completely rebuilt our urban landscape as LBJ said we must.  We have, at best, taken some pot shots at the pot holes.  Where leadership is focused on making the cities habitable and affordable there has been marked success.  For example, if you look at New York City today, compared to what was happening to it in the 60's clearly this is a city being rebuilt in the sense of the Great Society.  Brooklyn is dynamic in its rebuilding programs, Manhattan is alive with the tensions of a metropolis, but in the course of this rebirth we have moved from a manufacturing base to a service base.  Last time I was in NYC I found no evidence that anything but wealth is really made in the city anymore, but there remains a strong business base.  If you look at Detroit I think you see a city sinking deeper in the morass of failure.  Detroit is an example where government has set the conditions for business to leave, and where the population has a fundamental belief it is the governments role to take care of them.  What strikes me on these two examples is Detroit has been managed exclusively by Democratic mayors and city councils, while NYC has not been.   Is race an issue here?  Is this a case were whites are keeping the African-Americans down?  Since it appears all the Democratic Mayors of Detroit since 1974 are  African-American I am not sure how it would be the white-man's fault, but I suspect there is a way show it is.


How about the environment?  Funny thing about themes, they seem to shape the generation that buys into them.  Today we continue to hear about how we are destroying our environment and causing global warming from those same liberal factions.  Why is it now 45 years later we can't reach agreement on even the simplest of acts to begin reversing the catastrophic effects we are causing?  Surely it can't be exclusively the Republican party's fault can it?  Is it that while everyone has opinions about what we should do, there is no clear cause-effect relationship that we can turn to, or is it because we as individuals are unwilling to alter our life styles and sacrifice all the disposable creature comforts we have grown to love.  Perhaps it is because every time someone tries to do something, someone else takes umbrage?  Perhaps this all is governed by Newtons three laws. 

 I.  Every object in a state of uniform motion [or a state of rest] tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied.  

II.  A body of mass m subject to a force F undergoes an acceleration a that has the same direction as the force and a magnitude that is directly proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass, i.e., F = ma. Alternatively, the total force applied on a body is equal to the time derivative of linear momentum of the body,  and

III. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

It seems to me our federal government is clearly guided by the first and third laws.  For every proposed action there is an equal and opposite proposed reaction that leads it to remain at rest.  So when it is not spinning wildly out of control it is doing nothing.


So, how about education?  Over the past 45 years there has been a tremendous emphasis on better teachers, better paid teachers, better schools where the better paid better teachers can teach and the pursuit of advanced education for all.   Clearly with all the emphasis on this bipartisan issue we much have made great strides in education, and the educational level of our general population.  Apparently not, or at least that is what the vast majority of commercials seem to indicate.  In the past 45 years we have not paid our teachers enough, we have not improved our teacher quality enough and lord knows we still have crappy classrooms, but each year we make the teachers and students stay longer and longer.  Clearly there is just that more knowledge to be had and we can't even keep up.  What we have done is grow a couple of generations of children that will have posture problems from the backpacks and tons of books they carry around each day.  Just as we did back in the 60's we seem to be lagging the less then great world powers in most educational categories.  Yet somehow we continue to lead in innovation and technology.  All I can say is this is very befuddling.


So let's recap... The Great Society vision lays there waiting for the progressive government to implement, but according to the progressive vision, we have accomplished zip, nada, zilch!    Maybe that is what happens when you sit around waiting for the government to do everything for you.