Securing Safety in the Modern Age

“Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Our nation was built by those willing to risk all for the hopes of a better life.  Our past generations risked their lives to leave the oppressive hierarchy of Europe, where the divine right of kings and queens could not be questioned.  Where the hopes of better lives rested with the decisions of a removed and stratified upper class.  Where religious freedom was subject to the whims of whatever church was in power and where war and the sacrifices of the common man were frequently demanded.

For generations of Americans, we risked everything in the hopes of providing a future that was ours to build.  We traveled across the raging oceans and in the process settled on land where opportunity offered something our ancestors could not imagine, freedom to choose.  Of course, in the process, we made many selfish and morally questionable choices.  But the morality of those choices is only now apparent when we reflect back on them with the luxury of second-guessing those choices made when daily survival was a real concern.

We displaced a race of people who had themselves immigrated a thousand years earlier.  We fought them, conquered them, and placed them onto reservations.  We made promises we would routinely break for we are greedy people.  Now the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those peoples are beginning to gain a stake in our prosperity as they feed off that same human greed with the creation of gambling centers.

We grew our nation on the backs of slaves brought to our shores by those willing to profit off the trafficking of human beings sold into lives of servitude where their lives were viewed as little more important than the animal stock that constituted the wealth of the farmers and plantation owners who owned them.  We’ve not changed dramatically in the idea that it is okay to traffic in human beings as that is still a major enterprise in most of the world, including here in the Americas.

In the course of our growth into a nation, with our own national identity, we created a document that has withstood the changes of 230 years.  A document, which created the framework for a limited government, by the men who dared to write a previous document that stated our rights came not from government but from God when we told the King of Great Britain to take a hike. 

As more individuals of our nation reject the idea of God as the source of our rights, then it would seem inevitable they believe the power of government must come from them.  That the power of government is only limited by their willingness to stand against the wrongs of government overreach.  But what if their fears of the unknown outweigh their fear of government?  What then?

Let’s take a look at our current pandemic, and how it differs from previous pandemics.

First, we now have experts.  Not that we didn’t have experts before, but now we have a whole industry of experts on the television almost non-stop telling us how expert they are and how we need to believe them or we are all going to die.  In past pandemics, we would get snippets of advice and the media supporting the government would feed it to us in dribs and drabs.  Now we have them giving it to us in fear-producing bucketsful to convince us this pandemic is far worse than all the other pandemics around.

Of course, there may be an underlying motivation in a lot of these experts or the media channels that push them out to us.  We would have to be insane if we didn’t realize this, but then the fear of death can certainly push that insanity aside for a while.  For the past four years now, the political pundits on ABCNNBCBS and MSNBC have been vilifying the President while glorifying the professional politicians and bureaucrats that make up the core of the government in Washington DC.  Despite all the implications of fraud and deceit coming out of investigation after investigation the most we’ve seen about real punishment have been a couple of forced retirements.  This doesn’t count the cases the professional politicians and bureaucrats have brought against the Trump administration and the President himself.  But let’s focus on the impeachment for a minute.

As hard as the Democrats tried they could not come up with a criminal event to hang their impeachment on.  Two years of investigations came down to “an abuse of power” impeachment demonstrating it was a purely political exercise bound to fail in a Senate trial.  Then along came the Wuhan Virus, Chinese Virus, Corona Virus, or COVID-19 virus (take your pick).   

To keep us all safe from the dangers of a virus that threatened to kill us all we’ve shut down the economy.  I have a friend, who at the beginning of this said, “I’ll take this seriously when they close Disney World.”  The next day they announced its closure.  Even as they closed you could sense the panic being raised as they were widely criticized for having one last party on the last Sunday they were open.

At first, the administration was condemned for acting too hastily and when that proved not to be a good argument the drumbeat changed to not taking the virus seriously enough.  The governors demanded actions, the administration scrambled to meet their needs, but always with the political experts offering their political opinions, and the medical experts (both known and unknown) offering their scientific opinions.  Along the way we, as a population has had very little to say about what we should or should not do.  Of course, we are not experts in anything other than living our lives.  For the most part, we don’t make grand decisions that affect more than a few dozen lives and for that we are grateful.

But we’ve become a nation where half of us are willing to condemn the other half of us simply because we disagree with their political views.  Thanks to the internet and applications like Twitter® and Face Book® we can scream to the world all that is wrong with those other guys and why we must listen to this or that half of our politicians/media experts.

Now that we have surrendered our independence for the promised safety from this virus, how exactly will we regain it?  In looking at the roles of our politicians it appears to me that some are unwilling to give it back.  Of course, they are doing this in the name of keeping us safe.  Then we have those who would steal our independence because they are above the purview of our laws, how will we change that if we can’t agree even on the most obvious of points that individual liberty is the foundation of this nation.

Fiscal Reality

Whether we choose to accept it or not, there is one indisputable truth.  The United States’ role as the dominant world power will come to an end.  We will not hold this position forever, for in the recorded history of mankind no empire has survived forever.  The only question is what will cause us to become a second-tier nation?

After the Second World War we, along with the other victorious allies, created the United Nations.  The stated intent was simple, to give a forum for nations to talk, resolve differences and avoid war.  Anyone who has paid attention to the last 75 years should know how miserably it has failed on that last item.  In fact, only four years after its creation the UN mobilized a force to fight the communist takeover of the Korean peninsula.  Today the UN serves as a forum for large blocks of countries allied with various other powers to condemn the western world.  It also serves as a potential replacement for individual governments if the world were ever to come to agree on a one-world government, the problem in this aspect is how to manage the wealth of the world on a global basis, when so many have their own opinions on how they should be rich, but everyone else should share whatever is leftover.

As we crank up the printing presses for the second time this century to restart the economy and save the American way of life the first question I have is where does the actual substance of this wealth transfer come from?  Our currency is not based on real or tangible assets, rather it is based on the good faith the Government will stand good for the debt.  In the second World War, when we mobilized the nation to fight the threat of the Axis powers we borrowed from the American people.  Those who were around (I was not) may remember the bond drives, the offer to have towns or businesses buy a plane, a tank, or a ship.  We collected scrap metal, we (the government) limited the products we could buy, and we diverted all those resources to fight the war.  The government spent the next 50 years paying off that debt while accumulating more modern debt.  Kind of like the guy who gets a new credit card to pay off the old credit card and whose debt limit increases because banks see him as a good risk.  Until one day he can’t and the house of cards he built comes tumbling down.

I smile when I see my Democratic friends post about how unprepared we as a nation were for this pandemic, or how if we had universal health care we would be so much better off.  It is a sad smile, for their statements fly in the face of all available evidence. 

Let’s think about preparedness for a moment.  Each and every year this nation faces some kind of major catastrophe and it doesn’t matter who is President, in the eyes of the opposition we will always be unprepared.  It may be a major hurricane, a state ablaze with wildfires, the Great Plains states devastated by tornados, or earthquakes caused by the movement of the tetanic plates along the Pacific rim or in the Caribbean.  We as a nation, and especially our politicians, respond to the crisis before them.  The need is obvious, we must address the crisis at hand with the resource available and worry about the purchase of stuff for the next crisis when we have the time and resources.   

Unfortunately, for most of those in the Executive Branch the fact Congress can’t do its real job of passing a budget each year before the year starts it means there is never enough cash to do the nice to do things, and barely enough to do what the government must do.  Congress also has an endearing quality of telling the States what they must do, often without providing the states the funds to do it.  This puts the state governments in the potentially embarrassing position of not having all the resources available the Federal Government has mandated.

Now we come to the ideal of Universal Health Care.  Of all the countries currently affected by the COVID-19 virus, the U.S. is the one major world power without such a system.  For those countries with systems can we really say they were either better prepared or better able to handle the epidemic?  Only a scant four weeks ago people were pointing out how many more beds Italy had available when compared to the U.S.

Two weeks ago, people were saying we were totally unprepared with test kits to determine who had the virus and who didn’t.  Of course, China stepped in to offer its technical support and provide hundreds of thousands of kits around the world.  Unfortunately for the world, the accuracy of their test is in the 30-50% range and as a result, several nations like Spain and Germany are now abandoning them.

But I digress.

The issue I started with was how will we pay for the $2-trillion we’ve just authorized the government to spend.  It is a question I can ask, without a clue how to answer, but somewhere in the not too distant future some Congress and President will be forced to.  The question is what becomes of the United States when that day of reckoning comes?

p.s.  I may be alone in this opinion but I agree with Representative Thomas Massie, (R-KY) this historic assumption of debt should not have passed the House of Representatives with a simple voice vote where no individual is directly accountable for the decision.

OPERATION COVID-19

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Amid this medical crisis, I am struck by the similarities to a military campaign.  In war, if you could do everything, everywhere, at once to win the war you would, but that is never the case.  There is never enough equipment, never enough people, and never enough time to plan for that one big thing.  For this reason, wars are fought as a series of campaigns where the Nation’s limited assets can be brought to bear on the enemy with the greatest chance of success.  If successful, it will lead to another campaign, and another, until in the end the General (the Army, or the Nation) is successful.

For those who study history, especially military history, this idea is obvious.  Look at how the rag-tag Continental Army struggled from campaign to campaign until they were finally able to box in General Cornwallis and the British Army at Yorktown, Virginia.  Or the Civil war where first Lee and Army of Virginia and then Grant and the Union Army fought a series of battles, each part of a campaign strategy.  A strategy that ultimately failed for the South because at the end of the day they could not meet the industrial capability of the North.

Now we are confronted with a disease that until 6-months ago did not exist.  We can speculate ad nauseum as to how it developed, or who was responsible, but those debates do little to marshal the finite assets of the nation (or the world) to confront and overcome the enemy.

Since we are agreed this virus comes from China, let’s spend a few moments thinking about the war we are in with insights from a Chinese general who put these thoughts down some 2,500 years ago.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

Right now, let’s assume we know ourselves (but that will become the real question we must answer).  Clearly, we don’t yet fully understand the enemy.  It is for that reason we are in a delaying campaign as we gather our resources for what will become the next offensive campaign.  Think of the time after December 7, 1941, when the Japanese had decimated the Pacific Fleet, invaded the Philippines, taken over Singapore, and threatened Australia.  We could do little but begin the process of rebuilding, reequipping and training the new forces.  For a morale boost, we sent a small force of B-25 bombers to bomb the island of Honshu but the real efforts were behind the scenes. 

Isn’t that true for us today?  We are marshaling our resources, we have implemented policies intended to delay (not stop) the inevitable spread of the virus until we are better prepared to confront it head-on.  Of course, there are real consequences to this strategy.  First, we have a political opposition and press who have invested the last three years vilifying the chief executive and are now unable to put aside their distaste for the man for the good of the nation.  They question every decision the executive branch makes and questions why everything isn’t achieved yesterday.  It appears for the opposition the destruction of America is an acceptable consequence if they can destroy the man.  Of course, if this had been the opposition's position after December 7^th would we have been able to recover from the losses of Pearl Harbor?  I wonder.

“If you know yourself, but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”

As we deal with this pandemic there will be defeats as we learn more and more about the enemy.  The question for us as a nation is how will we deal with those defeats?  The recent experiences strongly indicate the political opposition will rejoice in each and every instance as they work to achieve their selfish political end.  We see this in the social media where each mistake along the way is highlighted and assigned as an individual fault of the President.  For example, when two people in Arizona decided to self-medicate with a fish tank cleaner with the anti-malaria chemicals the President had mentioned on his daily update.  On-line outlets like Axios were more than happy to condemn the President as if it was directly his fault.  They didn’t have the time, or desire, to make sure the facts of the story actually supported their political agenda.  If we can’t come together in this time of crisis the question is will we ever be capable of unity?

“If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Finally, we come to Sun Tzu’s bottom line.  The fact we refuse to know ourselves as a unified people with a vision for the future suggests this campaign has only a limited chance of success and the economic future of the country for a quick and sustained recovery is questionable. 

In a Modern World.

In looking at the great governmental debates going on in the United States I believe they really boil down to two simple (opposing) positions.  Do you believe the government is the answer to most problems or do you believe the government is a source of most problems?  This is a binary question and there are rarely binary problems or solutions, but if you look at the modern political debates everything is painted in absolutes and polarized positions. One side is good, the other evil.

There are clear things we must have a government for and people have organized since before recorded time to address those unavoidable needs.  I’m talking about things like defense, social order, the economy of effort, and other basic needs required for communal wellbeing.

Our founding fathers, as they wrestled with the failures of the government put into place following our divorce from England, argued about what the right kind of government was and how to implement it.  The failures of the Articles of Confederation were obvious in the way it limited the economic well-being and the defense of the colonies.  ThoughtCo provides a good synopsis on the weakness of the original government and the issues the founders hoped to address with their second effort.  In essence, the Confederation failed to provide sufficient centralized power to regulate the commerce between the states and raise a military to defend the colonies from either external threat, or internal rebellion when the need arose.  But in those debates, the fear of an all-powerful centralized government remained fresh in the minds of the political leadership who knew firsthand the potential abuses of the state.

As John Adams wrote,  “It is by balancing each of these powers against the other two, that the efforts in human nature toward tyranny can alone be checked and restrained, and any degree of freedom preserved in the constitution”[1]

I believe, since the Second World War, the government has grown far beyond what the founders could have ever imagined.  For example, Congress was not envisioned as a full-time job.  The capital, built on reclaimed swampland, was uninhabitable in the summer months, so the Representatives would meet for a little while, address the necessary actions and then return to their communities to resume a normal life.  Now they are full-time federal employees responsible more to the people who will offer them wealth than to the people they represent.  Senators were to be responsible to the state governments they represented, now they too are full-time employees seeking the wealth that comes from their positions.  The bureaucracy of the executive branch has never shrunk from what we expanded to in the war, only the roles and responsibilities have changed.  With the social legislation put into place during the Roosevelt years and greatly expanded during Johnson’s administration, we have created layer upon layer of workers and managers whose tenure is untouchable, overseen by the political appointees who will come and go with each new administration.

Ask yourself three questions:

Has this larger more encompassing government made our society better or has it simply reacted to the changing culture by fostering more dependence? 

Do the top-of-the-pyramid politicians shape the course of society or do they simply respond to it, as they vie for political dominance? 

Is the social order actually set by those who are beyond public scrutiny? 

What I find rather humorous, in my own cynical way, is that those who favor an all-powerful government are now emotionally outraged to the point of derangement over the fact their government is led by someone they despise, and he is doing things they don’t like.  It’s almost like they don’t understand Newton’s third law of politics (actually motion but I think you get my point).  To determine if an all-powerful government is really something even worthwhile let’s put that aside and talk about how wisely we, the nation, have chosen to spend our money to make America a kinder, more tolerant, and loving society.

Let’s put defense spending aside for a few minutes, for although that is frequently a topic of how much money the government wastes it is an increasingly smaller share of the total government spending.  Rather, let’s talk about the great social experiment we began with the creation of social security under the Great Depression-era President – Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  The idea behind social security was to create a safety net for those who had been unable to save for their retirement years.  It was planned as a self-paying program where those in the active workforce would pay into the account at rates equal to or higher than people would draw out.

It appears to be a natural condition in humans to believe if the government was going to pay them in retirement they could use the money they should be saving to meet their more immediate desires.  This is the path those in my generation “the baby boomers” chose.  As my generation matured and as the economy flourished the social security account prospered and grew.  Unfortunately for the social planners, the labor force in society has not continued to expand in size at the rates necessary to ensure contributions would always exceed the rates of withdrawal from the account. 

In the 1960s we saw the government add healthcare as an expense that should be borne/shared by the government, as well as the expansion of the social safety nets with increases in the welfare programs.  At the same time, the states began to look into providing their own supplemental programs in healthcare and welfare, and private industry (both healthcare, social welfare, and private insurance) expanded to profit from those new healthcare dollars.  All of these programs became “mandated” or “entitlement” programs and are in fact “must pay” bills the government is obligated to fund before it funds the discretionary things (like defense or infrastructure) that most politicians get rewarded for spending on. 

As the baby boomer generation retires it leaves a much smaller workforce behind to pay into the system that will now payout to the boomers who will live for another 30-40 years.  As a result, the mandatory spending on Social Security and Medicare become an ever-increasing portion of the nation’s gross domestic product.  Growing from roughly 4% in 1970 to 10% in 2016, with projections to grow to 15% shortly and with no relief in sight.  Expenditures are, according to several sources, growing at rates far greater than the general economy.

When you add in the fact that any money laying around on a balance sheet gives the Congress ideas on how to spend it on things like new programs you quickly see a problem where mandated spending will exceed mandated income.  There are always more problems than there are dollars to pay for them, and Congress (whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans) has shown little appetite to limit themselves to the money they will receive in taxes. The solution they always choose is to borrow money based on good faith in the country.  They will borrow until the lenders decide not to lend any more.  For my purposes, I assume the end of the lending train occurs about the same time the dollar stops being the currency of international trade.

The costs aside, what have been the social impacts of an expanding government with an ever-increasing demand for social engineering and social welfare programs?  Are we a better nation for the trillions of dollars we’ve spent on healthcare, social security, and social welfare? 

From my perspective, it sure doesn’t seem like we are.

Remember when the government said everyone should have the right to buy a house, and the government expanded its home-buying guarantees so even people who didn’t have the financial resources necessary to sustain the loans could get them?  We had Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac as pseudo-governmental guarantors of the loans.  Well, those programs certainly worked well, at least until 2008 when all the smoke and mirrors of the programs came crashing down and so many people found themselves in homes they couldn’t afford.  How many lives were impacted by those failures?

How about the basic building block of modern society?  I’m talking about the family unit.  Is the family unit as strong as it once was?  How about in the minority groups like African-Americans, the Hispanics, or the Native Americans?  Have the social support programs we’ve invested in made those groups more independent and stronger, or have they turned them into groups with an increasing dependence on the state?

We talk a lot about the “American Dream” where an individual with the drive and ambition can succeed in life and rise above the station he or she was born into.  Recently Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said this idea was absurd and no one could raise themselves up without the government doing it for them.  Some found this laughable coming from someone who just a couple of years earlier had been a bartender with a BS in Economics and was now making a six-figure salary as a Congresswoman.  But in one sense she was right.  It took her finding a government job that didn’t require any real skills (other than campaigning) to rise above the challenges she faced with the death of her Father.  Her biography is vague on what her parents did or how she was able to attend Boston University, so maybe she hasn’t pulled herself up at all and her statements are based on her real-life experiences. 

It seems, at least to me, the whole of the Democratic campaign centers on three main points.  First, we have the vehement anti-Trump rhetoric making claims that he is either a tool of the Russians, a bumbling idiot, or a criminal.  Next comes the campaign against wealth with the claims no one needs to be a billionaire and the idea the wealth of the rich takes away from the wealth of the poor (who are poor through no fault of their own), and finally a bigger government (run by the right party) would actually strengthen the middle class.

I’m sorry but after watching a bigger government unfold for the last 50-years, and regardless of the claims by the left’s adored leader, I’m not buying any of their claims.  The record is pretty clear, whenever government becomes the center of all society the middle class is actually weakened, if not destroyed.  It doesn’t matter if there is a Monarch, a Shaw, an Ayatollah, a dictator, a President for Life, a Prime Minister, a Chief, der Führer, or a General Secretary if the average person is totally dependent on the decisions of the Government for their welfare the middle class will be turned into the lower class within a decade.

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[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/checks-and-balances

Do We Know What We Know?

Space, the final frontier.

In March 2018 the President proposed creating a “Space Force” which would be like the Air Force, except for Space[1].  I doubt he came up with this idea all by himself, while resting between his twitter storms, so the question is why is this now becoming a thing?  Will we, or do we, intend to make Space a place for overt state versus state offensive military operations?  A friend recently suggested we do.  Perhaps we already have – since we have so many military assets in space.

Let’s start with what we know about Space and the current laws.  First and foremost, Space is really pretty big.  I suppose technically we are talking about everything from about 188 km (73.2 miles)[2] to the edge of the ever-expanding universe.  Covering our activities in this domain is the Space Treaty[3] signed and ratified by the U.S. in 1967.  In simple terms the treaty forms the basis for current space law, holds the nation-states responsible for activities (either governmental or commercial) originating from that nation-state, prohibits the placement of “weapons of mass destruction” in space or on the moon, and calls for the human explorers to be considered “envoys of mankind.”  Since this is a UN treaty I am not sure how much it actually deters a rouge power if that power chose to ignore it, but as a signatory, we do have legal obligations as we consider the roles and missions of our newly proposed Space Force.

It seems to me we are kind of where we were in the late 1930s when proponents of an independent U.S. air power began actively lobbying for a separate Air Force, and in turn, their fair share of the military budget.  It was then we began to see the predominant military air power theorists argue that air power should be a co-equal to the Army and the Navy and that air power alone could bring an adversary to the peace table and end a war.  At best, history has shown unless we are willing to take the consideration of civilian humanity out of the equation and just bomb the country into oblivion this is a flawed assumption.  At worst it is just wrong since unless we are willing to turn the land into a nuclear wasteland somebody has to eventually occupy the space and fill in the political vacuum we’ve created.

On the other side of the coin, control of the air domain is absolutely essential to allow U.S. ground and sea forces to maneuver and operate effectively.  Control of the space domain, at least within the standard orbital sphere, is equally essential to our success or failure in any sort of national engagement.  If we lose control of that space our assets essential for intelligence, communication, and navigation are lost, and so is our ability to operate within the domains below it.  So far, both commercial and military enterprises have placed only limited resources towards independent redundant capabilities in all those areas, and our reliance on those assets in space grows daily.

For the sake of argument let’s assume we create this Space Force to control and exploit what the U.S. Air Force today calls the “high ground.”  What exactly would their mission be? Within military parlance controlling the high ground has always been essential for successful military operations.  We put castles and fortresses on hills for two reasons, they can better see what is coming at them, and attacking forces would have to fight uphill to overcome them.  What exactly would we need to do to control the high ground in Space, is it even possible without completely eliminating all potential opponents.

What happens to global stability if we, operating singularly or with allies, choose to place offensive weapons in space to destroy another nation's access or use those weapons to target our adversaries’ capabilities in the air, sea and land environments.  To me, that is the $64,000-question.  It raises the same questions for the risk of war that emerged with the cold war when the two opposing sides developed extensive nuclear arsenals – ostensibly for the defense of their homelands.  Fortunately for us, reasonable men found ways to hold that power in check despite the tensions that arose. 

We successfully avoided that nuclear war because the political stakes were so high, and the politicians in charge had all seen the cost of war up close and personal.  The same cannot be said of today’s politicians or the societies they control.  The political elite no longer understands what war really means from a social and economic standpoint.  On top of that, we have a new breed of non-state actors with access to the technology once only available to large governments who create a whole new wild card in the game.

I am not sure how increasing the federal bureaucracy through the creation of new layers of command and building yet another force that will fight for funding for its own academy and the obligatory NCAA Division I football team will ensure we can effectively protect our interests in the Space domain.

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[1] https://gizmodo.com/trump-proposes-a-space-force-which-is-like-the-air-for-1823746231

[2] https://futurism.com/where-does-earth-end-and-space-begin/

[3] https://history.nasa.gov/1967treaty.html

A Question on Education (part 1)

As the new homestead becomes more organized and the panoramic windows of the sunroom show the light of a new day the quiet of a home still asleep affords me time for reflection, meditation, and prayer.  I love this time.  In this morning’s reflection, I thought about the role our educators play in shaping society.

Without educators, society would not advance.  We’d still be trying to figure out how to use rocks as tools to shape our environment, feed, and protect ourselves.  Each generation would be starting from scratch, rather than building on the lessons of previous generations.  The people who choose to share their knowledge and insight is one of the things that separates us from other species – that and the fact we use disposable footwear.

Throughout the history of mankind, there have been those who’ve discovered great truths and have shared those discoveries with others, and there have been those who although they’ve not discovered great things learned of them and passed them along to a much broader audience.  These “teachers” have been and are the backbone of our civilization.  Because of them, we have advanced from small isolated nomadic tribes into great societies. 

I think of a teacher as one who opens the eyes of the young, not to a particular belief, but to the almost infinite variety of the world around them.  Teachers differ from trainers in this important aspect.  Trainers teach someone how to do a specific thing in an approved manner.  On the other hand, teachers should instill a desire to learn, to think, to question and to expand their personal horizon.  The better they are at creating a questioning mind the closer they come to greatness.  Unfortunately, despite today’s trend for participation trophies, greatness is found only in the smallest minority of the population.  The rest of us struggle to just be above average, or surrender to life and become numbers on a bell-shaped curve.

Teaching has always come with some risk.  Take, for example, Socrates.  Perhaps the first great philosopher of Athens, teacher of Plato and Xenophon[1], he is credited with creating the basis for modern (Western) logic and argument.  Yet, as Athens declined he was tried, convicted, and executed for arguing against the way Athenians clung to past glory rather than advance their political thinking.  Perhaps that will always be the way with education; those great thinkers among us see things differently and when the traditional ways are challenged there is a societal push back.

But not every teacher is a Socrates or a Plato.  As we see in modern media, the idea of rigorous debate, logic, and argument are as much out of favor today as in ancient Greece.  There are those who cling to the past, and there are those who revile it.  So, what is the role of a teacher in these times?  Is to indoctrinate the young into thinking in the right way, or is it to create a questioning mind open to the possibilities?

From my perch – it seems to me the institutions where debate, argument, and enlightenment should occur have turned into training centers rather than high schools, colleges, and universities.  Young minds are not opened to the possibilities, they are shaped into the same boxes their educators were shaped into and come away with a belief system so fragile it cannot stand up to challenge.  If challenged – the response is almost always visceral.  Isn’t this what we see in society today?  Who trained these behaviors into our young?  The answer is simple, we did.  As parents and teachers, we have taught our children to act as they do, but we have also trusted our educators to maintain and strengthen our society, but it seems they have moved away from that role into one of their own choosing.

Perhaps it’s because we’ve moved decisions on education away from a local level of cooperative control to indifferent State and Federal bureaucracies, or maybe it is because our teachers have been trained by those who disparage our society?  Then again, perhaps it is as the entertainment industry has informed us we are too narrow-minded to be trusted with educational decisions and they must be left to education professionals with PhDs? Could it be perhaps as simple as the age-old struggle between workers and owners?  Is it possible the unionization of teachers where the power of the union, and politicians willing to spend other people’s money, have made the unions so powerful they are able to protect politically important but incompetent teachers who are committed to the success of a single political party over the ideals of true liberal education, which opens the minds of students and teaches them to think for themselves?  Everyone seems to have an opinion on a cause, but I don’t see a lot of viable solutions, and what has the current system gained us?

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[1] https://www.biography.com/people/socrates-9488126

A Few Thoughts on a Single Payer Healthcare System

Remember when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PP ACA, also known as Obamacare) was to serve as the pathway to a single-payer healthcare system as exampled in Great Britain and a number of other European countries?  At the time the supporters were quick to point out how low the cost of health care was for the average person and even the poorest would receive quality healthcare.  The opponents of the law saw it as government overreach and said that it would implement “death panels” where the state would choose who would live and who would die.  Of course, this idea was dismissed by those who supported central control as just outlandish foolishness.  Which brings us to today’s news.

First, there was Charlie Gard an 11-month who suffered from a rare and fatal condition, and the doctors of the National Health Service told to parents to just let him die as continued treatment was not going to be supported.  When they challenged this, it became apparent the NHS viewed young Gard as a ward of the state and the parents had no real say in the decision.

Now we have the second example before us, again the NHS is telling the parents of Alfie Evans they won’t offer additional treatment for what is likely a terminal illness.  They took him off oxygen and when he continued to breathe they stopped feeding him.  To further their position they won’t let the parents take him elsewhere where other doctors are willing to treat him.  Even the Pope has weighed in on the subject.

You can say what you want about capitalism versus socialism, private insurance versus government insurance, private healthcare versus public healthcare and all the other economic comparisons but at the end of the day it comes down to someone determining a cost versus benefit.  The question in health care is who should that be?

Clearly, for the British National Health Service (as supported by the courts) it is their position the nameless and faceless bureaucracy of the state is where that decision rests, it is after all the state that is paying for the care.  The rights of the parent are subject to state approval and control.  But is the system equal for all?  If the parents were the Winsor’s would the decision of the state be the same?  While I doubt it, I don’t know for sure, but I can’t imagine a bureaucrat being called before the Queen to explain his/her decision.

In our system, as flawed as it is, where does the decision lie?  The answer to that, of course, depends on financial status and the compassion of the various providers, both financially and medically.  There are children’s hospitals where there is sufficient financial support that the families in their care are not, as far as I know, asked to make the tough choice of what is affordable and can decide with their doctors on what is best for the child.

If we do eventually move to a “single-payer” system managed by a government bureaucracy the decision of life or death versus cost will become a part of the equation.  It is inescapable when faced with a fiscal reality of budget limits.  We see it in the VA today, and it is simply foolish to think it would not be there on a larger scale in a larger system.

For those who support the single-payer system be prepared to transfer your decisions on life and death to the state based on a simple algorithm of how much your life is worth to the state, versus how much will it cost to maintain it.

Who Cares About the National Debt?

I view myself as a fiscal conservative and believe when our debt level exceeds our ability to pay for it, or other nations lose confidence in our ability to repay -- the government will fail.  But that is not a view held by either party in our Federal Government, so why bother talking about the national debt at all?

For eight years the Republican’s complained about the Obama administrations debt spending, yet once they controlled both the legislature and executive they have done precisely as the past administration.  Over the past six months, I think they increased the national debt by $1,000,000,000,000.92, all while blaming the villainous Democrats.  Of course, the Democrats helped all this with their Trumpmania conspiracy theories that fill the news cycles.

Let’s get real.  You don’t get to govern and then complain about how those other guys are making you spend all this money.  The only question between the Democrats and the Republicans is who gets to benefit from the spending? 

In the past administration, despite all its allusions, deflections and pointless rhetoric about protecting the poorest, it was Wall Street, insurance companies, internet giants, and the bankers who made out like bandits.  Savings accounts earned next to nothing, welfare was pretty much on autopilot, and the unemployment rates slowly came down as people abandoned the workplace.

In this administration, it seems to be the military-industrial complex, the insurance companies, bankers and investment firms that will make all the money despite the allusions, deflections and pointless rhetoric about returning money to the middle class.

I will never again believe a Republican when he or she says they are concerned with the national debt.  The number is, as the Democrats have pointed out, a self-imposed value serving solely as a club to beat over the head and shoulders of your political rival.

In the immortal words of that great economist, social commentator, and philosopher Stan Lee - ‘nough said!

It Seems Kind of Ironic

I was thinking about our history as I took the trash out to a chilly morning.  It was a chilly December night in 1773 when the radical group “The Sons of Liberty” went to the Boston harbor to protest the imposition of tax on tea imports.  This was the last of the duties (taxes) imposed by the Townshend Acts of 1767.  The intent of Charles Townshend’s duties was to help defray cost to the crown for maintaining and defending the colonies.  Those affected by this burden saw it as governmental overreach.

Today, as we look at the descendants of those radicals we find the radical spirit still remains.  Only now they are in favor of higher taxes (as long as it’s not on them), and greater government control (as long as it is by people they agree with).  When others come to disagree and suggest the original Sons of Liberty had the right idea, that perhaps there is too much government and the spending of the government is really overreach -- those views are yelled down.

Just a Few Thoughts on Trump Derangement Syndrome

There are things I don’t care for in President Trump, but then I could say the same thing about Presidents Obama, GW Bush, Clinton, GH Bush and every other President I’ve served or lived under.  It is sadly amusing though to observe the ever-deepening nature of the attacks on his Presidency by those who oppose him and the agenda that carried him into office.

About 18 or so months ago the left became aware Donald Trump posed a threat to the anointing of their queen in waiting and began the vilification of someone they had loved for his money.  The propaganda arm of the Democratic Party (also known as Main Stream Media), began an all-out assault on Mr. Trump’s personality as well as attempting to influence the average voter with the fact he had little-to-no chance of being elected.  Their strategy proved ineffective, and Mr. Trump was elected through a political process that has sustained our country for about the last 83,823 days.  The fact the electoral college was a key to success somehow eluded the Clinton brain trust, but that is another topic.

Subsequent to his election we have seen those with progressive and liberal agendas push their points of view through riot, media propaganda, and ad hominem attack.  I find it next to impossible to find a Democrat who can make a reasoned or logical response on why the President’s policies or actions are not beneficial to the country.  It is as if a sizeable portion of the nation has swallowed LSD and are living in an alternate reality where emotion is the currency of exchange and cause and effect is the illusion.

Of course, Mr. Trump routinely fuels the media frenzy using its own tools.  He has boldly implemented the concept of instant communication with the masses and passed by the pundits who feel compelled to tell the average citizen what the President is really thinking, thus outraging those who seek to control him or the dialogue.  This will cause confusion on the world stage as foreign leaders are then forced to figure out what he really means and what he intends to do. 

Uncertainty can be a two-edged sword.  There are those who argue that uncertainty increases risk, just as others argue it is a useful tool in dealing with hostile foreign powers.  With the former President, there was little uncertainty.  We and our enemies knew, for the most part, his words and threats were empty.  Our foreign policies reflected that, and threats grew and flourished.  If we should have learned one thing in the years of President Obama, it is that appeasement of a hostile threat does not work.  It is a lesson brought again to the big screen with the movie Churchill.  Unfortunately, many on the left are unable to understand that, but that is not the point of this post.  Rather, I want to reflect on the increasing hyperbole and rhetoric of those who oppose the President and his agenda.

Today it seems every time counter-Trump messaging fails - the political leadership is compelled to ratchet up the hyperbole.  For example, just a couple of days ago Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called the Republican tax bill “the worst bill to ever come before the House.”  You will forgive me if I find this a laughable statement.  I would think the laws Congress has passed that remove individual protections[1] are far worse than a law that lowers taxes for a majority of the nation.  During her time as Speaker, she helped pass the 2011 Defense Authorization Act that allows the government to indefinitely detain a US citizen on the suspicion he or she may be a terrorist.  Then, of course, we have laws like the Fugitive Slave Act that mandated escaped slaves must be returned to their owners.  This was pushed through by the democratic party in 1850.  My takeaway from those complaining about tax legislation is; safeguarding individual rights are far less important to the party than maintaining a status quo, condemning the opposition, or vilifying an individual while maintaining their hold on a dependent poor and their emotion-driven true believers.

So, let’s talk about the tax bill and what’s in it, or not.  Since I can’t seem to find the actual legislation awaiting the President’s signature I will refer back to the original House bill that was changed by the Senate and the conference committee for some points I’m pretty sure didn’t change too much. 

The liberal press is making a big deal about things like the mortgage on a 2^nd home no longer being deductible, but seem to be leaving out the 2^nd home part of the deal.  How many people have two homes they are deducting?  Will this be a loss to the lower middle class, or people who have summer homes, or RV’s and boats that have a toilet and a kitchen?  Maybe, but will this really be a tragic loss for most middle-class America?  Probably not.

What I don’t hear the press talking about is the doubling of the individual deduction.  While they talk about the loss of this or that deduction, it will be interesting to see if the average person making between $35 & $85,000 has historically had enough deductions to equal the new individual allowance.  Somehow that seems to be missed by the big city reporters who eke out a living on their high six and seven-figure salaries. 

-- Break, Break --

These observations are interrupted at this time to address a fundamental question.  Why do we pay taxes?

You know, the government didn’t always have a personal income tax, right?  For the longest time, it managed to get by with the money it received from import taxes and tariffs.  It is true that personal taxes were levied from time to time to pay for things like war, but it was not formally institutionalized until the government outgrew its own spending limitations and the 16^th Amendment was ratified (1913).  Today, personal income tax is the single biggest funding source for the US government.

Therefore, we pay taxes to secure all the things we want the government to do for us.  Unfortunately, we have also created a government that does not believe it is necessary to live within its own rules.  It budgets and spends more money than we are obligated to give it.  We as a society have become increasingly demanding on the things we want from the government while in the meantime decreasing the number of people who actually pay into its funding program.

There is one truth.  The more money the government has, the more it will spend.  Usually, on stuff, only a small percentage of Americans think we need.

The one question that seems unanswerable is, who has the best idea on how to spend your individual wages?  Is it you, or is it the government?  This last question is really the heart of the fiscal divide separating the two political ideologies.

-- I return you now to the current discussion --  

There are a number of things, in the new tax bill, that I believe are flawed, but I’ve given up the notion we will ever achieve a balanced budget or find a path where the two political parties will again begin to hash out their differences and find reasonable compromise for the benefit of the American middle class.

On one side, we have a party that thrives on separating the various economic classes by singling out those who have achieved wealth through commerce and increasing the economic dependence of the poor on the government.  On the other, is a party identified as being made up of zealots and big business lackeys, whose every action is characterized as making the rich – richer.

Since this new law is a unilaterally approved effort with no Democrats voting for it, and we have mid-term elections coming up in about 10-months; those elections will tell us if the average voter finds the lower taxes to be a benefit, or if they buy into the ideas pushed by the DNC, and its media, that the Republicans are out to screw the county.

I’m betting the GOP will lose control of the Senate, and we will again enter the age of rule by fiat we first saw in the Obama administration.  I hope I’m wrong.

---

[1] http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/15108-congress-10-worst-infringements-on-personal-liberty

What Do American’s Think About Flying in Space?

Space-X Dragon 3

Boeing CST-100

This morning’s news carries a headline in Bloomberg Technology “Americans Will Head to Space Again Without a Russian Taxi.”  The article talks about the efforts of Elon Musk’s company Space-X, and the Boeing Company's progress in qualifying a capsule for manned-flight.  Allowing us to move away from our current dependence on the only NASA approved space capsule, the Russian Soyuz, as our ride to the international space station.  NASA’s last flight with the Space Shuttle was in August 2011.  If all goes well we could perhaps have a capsule ready for routine use by 2019, but 2020 seems more likely.  If we keep to this timeline, it will mean the Russians have met our needs for almost ten years.

Exploration is one of the essential qualities of mankind.  At least it used to be.  What would the world look like if the Queen of Spain had not financed Christopher Columbus’s failed venture to find a shorter route to China?  With the exception we would be tearing down someone else's statue, I think it would look almost exactly like it does today.  For within the human spirit, others would have stepped up to finance and sail in search profit and knowledge.  But we have lost the fire that John Kennedy ignited when he decided we must compete with the Communists of the USSR and reach the moon by the end of the decade, and we have lost the ability to reach the consensus that Lyndon Johnson played against as he sank massive numbers of dollars into the race to the moon.

Today NASA, and our space program, has become just another of the on-going and self-justifying bureaucracies without the clear national vision it once had.  You need only look at the fact we’ve been willing to use the Russian Uber service while we putzed around seemingly without purpose and clearly without vision on how best to get ourselves into low and medium earth orbit. 

In the same amount of time that NASA, with scientists, mathematicians and engineers, using slide rules and less computational capability than an apple watch took to organize and run three building block programs that took us from single person sub-orbital flight to landing two astronauts and a dune buggy on the moon, we may be able to approve one or two different capsules able to reach the international space station and return with two or three passengers.

Off-hand I’d say we Americans don’t think too much about flying in space, and that is unfortunate.