Comment spam dealt with... I think

Okay, I turned on word verification (which I thought would be a setting for all my blogs when I turned it on in Backlog Bob's Blog - my other blog). Also, I set the already-spammed posts to hide existing comments, so if you left a comment on one of those posts, please feel free to leave it again on another post, or better yet, teach me how to delete some comments while leaving others; I am not as blog-savvy yet as I'd like to be. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

SRS

Further DeLay

According to Byron York of National Review, the movie being made about DeLay prosecutor Ronnie Earle shows him saying "This is in the Bible. This isn't rocket science. The root of all evil truly is money, especially in politics." Actually, the Bible says (KJV): "For the love of money is the root of all evil." (Emphasis added to show the difference between Earle's statement and the God-breathed Scripture he tried to quote.) Nowhere in Scripture is there even a hint that money is evil, or the root of evil. The difference is not small. Suppose I said: "Lust for women causes almost all of the sin in men's lives." Without debating the value of my statement, suppose you quoted me as saying "women cause almost all of the sin in men's lives" - would that be an accurate quotation? Or, for my secular readers, if any, let's say a leading psychiatrist says: "Obsessing over one's work is unhealthy." To quote that psychiatrist the way Ronnie Earle quoted the Bible, you'd have to say: "Work is unhealthy."

So what? Well, the difference in the two understandings of the quoted verse makes a huge difference in what a person thinks and does. For one thing, people who understand the verse the way Earle does view people like Bill Gates and Sam Walton and Andrew Carnegie as among the most evil men of history. People who understand the verse the way I do are unwilling to consider evil someone whom we've never met. Also, if money is the root of all evil, giving it to the poor seems like something the Devil, not Christians, should be doing, since it would just be bringing evil into their lives. I don't know if Mr. Earle has taken his interpretation of this verse that far yet. Again, if money is the root of all evil, real Christians would throw it into the fireplace every chance they get - buying groceries with it would be out of the question, because that would make grocery stores and their employees more evil; Christians would be divided into two groups: the monastic Christians who grow their own food so they can circumvent the need for money, and evangelical Christians who try to earn as much money as they can to throw it into the fireplace - so as to spare everyone else its evil. This would be futile of course, as the government would just print more (and perhaps arrest those money-burning Christians), and the evil would be spread around nonetheless. Christians who understand this verse, on the other hand, know that money does have uses that are holy and righteous, and that there is nothing wrong with money in itself. The love of money (as Scripture says) is a root of all evils. If you love money (that is, if you are greedy), then you will have all kinds of problems. That is, if you always want more money, or are more afraid of losing your money than you are of letting go to waste by not helping anyone, then you love your money, and that will result in evil in your life. However, no matter how much money you have, as long as you see it as a tool to do good, and not as something to be desired on its own, you will always do what is right with your money, and it will result in no evil in your life. As Ronnie Earle said: "This is in the Bible. This isn't rocket science."

Basically, Ronnie Earle needs to learn Scripture better so he can apply it correctly, instead of misquoting it so that it seems to justify his actions. I hope he sincerely wants to do right, and he will be in my prayers for a while.

SRS

DeLay of game

So Republican representative from Texas Tom DeLay is a crook? What was that he did? He (omigosh!) tried to help consenting adults fund political speech, something that violates campaign finance law. That's right, political speech violates campaign finance law. In this case, the law that DeLay broke is a Texas state law, but the principle is the same: you can either respect campaign finance laws or you can respect U.S. and state constitutions to which such laws are supposed to be subordinate. You see, the U.S. constitution says that congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech, or of the press. And yet congress did just that with "campaign finance reform," putting limits on what can be said during a campaign, and when, and how - abridging freedom of the press as well as of speech. The story is pretty much the same with the Texas constitution. In fact, in the middle of typing that last sentence, I went to the Texas state government web site and copied the following text directly out of their constitution:

no law shall ever be passed curtailing the liberty of speech or of the press

It seems pretty clear that they're not supposed to have laws curtailing the liberty of speech and of press, does it not? So whatever doodoo DeLay might be in is nothing compared to what the Texas legislature should be in for disobeying their own constitution. They should be removed from office in an emergency recall election, and every one of them replaced by Austrian bodybuilders. But seriously, when are legislatures - both federal and local - going to start abiding by the constitutions that are supposed to govern them? And if they're not, where are the checks a balances? I guess they're busy making up their own unconstional legislation in the forms of executive orders and judicial rulings. [sigh]

SRS

P.S. If DeLay gets kicked out of congress for this, we need to repeal CFR laws without DeLay.

Frist's conflict of interest.... maybe

I just read on CNN.com that Sen. Bill Frist, Senate Majority (Republican) Leader from Tennessee, was involved in personally handling investments that he was supposed to have in a blind trust (to prevent a conflict of interest). If this is true, we need a different conservative leader in the Senate, a different conservative senator from Tennessee. Someone who takes conservatism seriously.

Then again, it was CNN. We should take this story with a grain (or a pound) of salt.

SRS

Moore and Kutcher marry: an observation

Do you remember when women used to be indignant about middle-aged (or older) men marrying women much younger, even young enough to be their daughters? Well, it looks like some women have reached the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" stage of that argument. American feminism has now ducked down this path with every sexual more I can think of.

Also: as far as the argument goes that the younger person is being married because (s)he is so mature, it seems a little outlandish when applied to Mr. Kutcher.

America's education problem

There's a problem with education in this country. America falls farther and farther behind the rest of the world in standardized international tests, even falling behind some countries that were recently considered third-world countries (Poland, the Czech Republic) in math and science. Surveys indicate that all too many recent high school graduates are ignorant of history as well. Why is America doing so much worse at educating its youth than it used to do, when it is spending so much more on education? Quite simply, those in charge of such things tolerate incompetence, especially at schools in poor neighborhoods. The same studies that show America falling behind other countries in education also show that the problem is worst in America's poorest neighborhoods, and that middle class and wealthy neighborhoods produce far better results. The per-student spending is not lower in these areas; in fact, if the District of Columbia (the capital) were a state, it would rank 51st in education, even though its per-student public school funding is higher than any state's average. It has small class sizes, too, not even counting the sky-high truancy rate. So why aren't the students who are actually there getting a top-notch education? Incompetent teachers, low expectations for the students, grade inflation, among other reasons. It's the same in poor, urban school districts across the country.

What caused all of this? Well, it happened over time, as school districts became more and more bureaucratic, and the schools tended to attract teachers who were sympathetic to bureaucracy and government control, and they formed powerful unions to resist implementations of standards. In middle and upper class neighborhoods, these ill effects were alleviated by the participation of parents in their children's education. With so much more single parenthood and, sadly, apathy in the poorer neighborhoods, those parents who cared about their children's education and had the time to do something about it were few enough that those schools had almost no resistance to stop them going the way of every other unchecked government program - down the toilet.

Now, there's an alliance between the teachers' unions and the Democratic party to perpetuate the status quo - lousy schools in poor neighborhoods, teachers still paid more than most people of the same level of education, most poor public high school students still ignorant of history and math (and almost all high school students lacking the ability to think critically or logically). Whenever the topic of education problems comes up, almost any Democrat (officeholder or voter) will try to make the issue about spending more federal money or shrinking class sizes or equipping classrooms with computers. But really, all that's needed is more accountability, competition, and incentives - in other words, the free market. It doesn't even have to be the drastic change you might think. It just takes vouchers - vouchers have been proven not only to improve the overall education of a given school district, or even a whole state, but also to improve the performance of the public schools that are losing funds! This quite thoroughly debunks the argument that vouchers (via exclusive private schools) rob public schools of their most gifted students and that the worst students stay at public schools to suffer even worse education than before. The competition for funding creates an incentive for schools to do what they're supposed to, when there's no incentive for effective (and potentially unpleasant) action otherwise.

So why are Democrats so resistant to this idea? The answer is really ugly, but it needs to be revealed: they need ignorant voters for their constituency. And they can disguise the ignorance of their constituency with a fraudulent high school diploma; they can hide the impact their destructive policies have on minorities with "affirmative action" (a policy that treats minority applicants as much more qualified than they really are when they try to get into a public university or get a government job). All of this has the potential to devastate the lives of the minorities and the poor directly involved, but that is of little concern to power-hungry politicians.

I am by no means trying to imply that Republicans are innocent in all of this. Republicans who gave up fighting for vouchers are either duplicitous or cowardly, and that includes the president. As on immigration control and cutting government spending, he betrayed the values of those who voted for him, to the detriment of the whole country.

SRS

Axiom

It takes a lot of effort, time, and persistence to devastate the soul of a great nation - but it's worth the trouble, because it takes far more of each to repair it.

Katrina looters are evil

There's no excuse for looting big-screen TV's in the middle of a crisis. There's no justification for what these pigs are doing. One of them shot a police officer in the head. If this is the way we behave when our neighbors need our help, we don't deserve to govern ourselves. Chaos is not freedom. Chaos is the progenitor of tyranny. When someone has the opportunity to loot, he should ask himself, "Do I want to live in a place without the rule of law?" A place like Uzbekistan, where the one with the most bribes wins. Or Haiti, where if you don't taste silver when you're born, you're practically doomed to live out your brief existence in your own filth (or someone else's) on the streets. Haiti is like that because people who thought they were poor took what they could get, any way they could get it - and now their children and grandchildren are finding out what poverty really is.

If you don't think looting is a big deal, if you take what isn't yours when you get the chance, you're helping to kill the police. And you're pushing your city/state/country towards the slope to Haiti. So go ahead and loot if you don't think a few lives are worth that new TV, and if you don't mind your descendants being covered in their own urine, just so long as you get that sweet gizmo from Radio Shack that you've always wanted.

SRS

Note: this blog entry used to be found at Backlog Bob's Blog. It no longer appears there.

Eminent Domain, part II: Killing the goose the lays the golden egg

As was noted in last week's article, there is a difference between the perception of conservatives and the reality. Conservatives are sometimes perceived to be pro-corporation, but they are actually supportive of certain economic policies that usually help corporations in general, but sometimes are devastating to particular corporations. These economic policies are generally summed up as "free market capitalism" or "laissez-faire economics." The idea is that government should have no role in the economy except to halt theft and fraud, and only with a relatively narrow definition of those - in many instances requiring consumers themselves to police dishonest salesmen, a situation known as the "buyer beware" stance on fraud. This cuts both ways with corporations, though: if a corporation (such as a bank or an airline) is failing, a true conservative would let it fail (as opposed to using government to help it), because corporate failure is a natural, legitimate, and necessary process of the market economy.

Someone who might think he's a conservative - but really isn't - might believe that using eminent domain laws to seize private property from individuals and give it to corporations is a good thing, because of not just the increase in tax revenue, but the jobs it would create and whatnot. But if conservative economic policy were a religion, private property rights would be the High Sacrament. Unequivocally the most important part of laissez-faire economics is the right to own property and do what you wish with what you own. And this is not just an abstract principle with no practical implications. It is nearly impossible to overstate the economic devastation wrought by the denial of private property rights, or even in some cases the threat of denial of those rights. No one who has a choice will invest in an area where they think the government might take away everything that they've invested in and worked for. If somehow forced to, a company or entrepeneur will likely fail because of the lack of other investors and inevitable lack of infrastructure resulting from the flight of those companies and individuals necessary to build and maintain infrastructure. From history come numerous examples of this process, including the modern-day totalitarian regimes in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the former Soviet Union, and Southeast Asia.

The point is, private property rights are like the goose that laid the golden eggs in that famous fable. A government that diminishes the rights of private citizens to their own property, be it local, state, or national, anywhere in the world, is akin to the farmer (or farmer's wife) who, in greed, killed a goose that laid golden eggs, only to find nothing of value inside. As a part of a free market system, property rights produce the golden eggs of an abundant economy where everyone has a chance to prosper, innovation is encouraged, and everyone's quality of life gradually (or rapidly) increases over time. Greedy government officials sometimes want to just grab this wealth are trampling on private property rights, and will soon find their actions have frightened off potential entrepeneurs investors who will go to another city, state, or even another country if necessary, where there is more freedom to keep what belongs to you. Without entrepeneurs or investors, the economy will slow, backslide, or fail completely, depending on the extent of the property rights violations.

SRS

Note: this blog entry used to be found at Backlog Bob's Blog. It no longer appears there.

Eminent Domain, part I: The difference between perception and reality

"Eminent Domain" is the legal euphemism used when local or state governments seize private property from individual citizens to give to corporate developers who will pay higher taxes because of having built higher-valued buildings on the land in question. This is a horrible process, but one small good comes of it.

Appearing to change the subject, I'd like to remind my readers of all the times they heard that conservatives are for corporations or state and local governments, and that liberals are for the little guy, and use the federal government to help him out. I'd like to point out that in eminent domain cases, naturally, conservatives have a clear claim staked on their loyalties: a coalition of state or local governments and big corporations together trying to screw over the liberals' little guys. Conversely, the liberals are obviously going to oppose these eminent domain shams, right?
Surprise! Hated conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the conservative and ultra-conservative columnists and opinion journalists who support him all oppose the seizing of private property to turn it over to those who will generate more tax revenue. Why would they oppose their corporation-friends, you ask?

Real conservatives don't love corporations on principle. They love the constitution and the just use of the law. They don't seek the good of corporations in all things. They seek the correct application of the law, the chief law being the Constitution, which has always prohibited the use of eminent domain laws to increase tax revenue.

So, if conservatives don't support this use of "eminent domain," just who does, you well might ask. The answer is: liberals! Even though I don't like using such a nice name to describe such illiberal people, that's what they're called in this day and age. Liberals are always the ones behind using eminent domain laws to seize private property and hand it over to corporations who will pay more in property taxes (and probably more income tax too). Why would they hurt the little guy, whom they putatively love, and help corporations, whom they putatively hate? The truth is that liberals see government (be it national, state, or local) as the source of all good things, and higher tax revenue and higher government spending are always sought, at the expense of just about anything else, be it corporation, or little guy, or the law itself.

The real difference between conservatives and liberals is this: conservatives put law above the government, while liberals put government above the law.

SRS

Note: this blog entry used to be found at Backlog Bob's Blog. It no longer appears there.

Iraqi "Girly-men"

If I may borrow a page from the governor of California, I think that the legislature is a bunch of girly-men. No, not the California legislature, but rather that of Iraq. I just finished reading a story from the AP about how the Iraqi legislature "adjourned in protest Tuesday and demanded an apology" from the U.S. What heinous crime did the U.S. commit against the august legislature of Iraq that would warrant such righteous indignation? Did the U.S. imprison one of the Iraqi lawmakers? Did the U.S. kill Iraqi civilians? Did the U.S. neglect its protective duty and allow attackers to kill one of the lawmakers? No; apparently one of the eminent legislators was frisked. To be precise, he was handcuffed and momentarily held after he started fighting with a coalition translator. So to protest his mistreatment, he went to the esteemed legislative body of which he is part and (I am not making this up) he cried. You read that right: he cried.

As an enlightened and sensitive man, I know that there are appropriate times for a man to cry. Standing in front of an historic parliamentary proceeding and recounting losing a fight that you started is not one of them.

Imagine this: your country, country A, has been freed from a brutal tyrant by country B, and country B encourages country A to establish a constitutional republic in place of the totalitarian rule erstwhile endured by A. People of A vote, and elect you as delegate to make this constitution that will guide A's nascent republic through dark times to a brighter future. Meanwhile, friends of aforementioned deposed tyrant and various other enemies of B are killing the citizens of A left and right while B's army is doing what it can to stop them. Then another delegate stands up in the middle of a legislative session and starts crying about how he was touched by one of the soldiers in B's army. The normal human response would be to have a hearty laugh at the crybaby's expense, and get on with the important business of the country.

Not so the Iraqi legislature. Perhaps the Kurds laughed. But as a whole, the Iraqi legislature adjourned in protest. Surely they heard about the dozens of Iraqis dying in insurgent attacks? How must they who were wounded by these attacks feel? They're probably thinking: "I voted for one of those shmucks? I dipped my index finger in purple ink so these guys could extend an entirely different finger at the people who got us this far?"

I think the U.S. should stop protecting the legislature as long as they behave like complete idiots, and start devoting those resources to protecting the more grateful segments of Iraqi society.

SRS

Note: this blog entry used to be found at Backlog Bob's Blog. It no longer appears there.

Some thoughts on a former congressman and the question of Freedom

Now, I was reading an article in my local newspaper that was written by a former congressman whose name rhymes with "Lob Farr" and whose initials are BB. He was writing about some company's new policy of firing anyone who is a smoker whether or not they smoke on the job. The point of his article was that this violates the rights of this hypothetical worker who is a smoker but doesn't smoke on the job, because it invades their privacy. The writer wanted congress to pass a law forbidding this company (and all others) to dismiss anyone for being a smoker; the passage of this law would protect the rights (freedoms) of these workers, so they could be free to smoke at home.

In reality, anyone can smoke at home if they want to, it's just that there may be consequences for that: lung cancer, emphysema, and now, dismissal from your job. But Mr. Farr (pseudonym) thinks that government should step in to prevent that last consequence from ever materializing. There can be some consequences for your actions, but gov forbid that any consequences be imposed by your employer. Employers are people too. At least, they are entities that should have some rights and some autonomy before the law under a constitutionally limited government.

So which freedom is more important: the freedom of smokers to keep their jobs, or the freedom of employers to fire them? The question is inherently flawed, because keeping your job is not a freedom, but rather a consensual arrangement between the employer and the employee. When either party's consent is made irrelevant by government action, that party's freedom is lost, and what the other party gains is not freedom. Freedom is an absence of government-imposed limits, slavery, and imprisonment. When government acts, it should first prove that the freedom it takes away is less important than the benefit or protection it provides. For instance, a prohibition on murder is considered more important in the life it protects than the freedom to act (on a desire to kill) that it takes away. When government imprisons a thief, it takes away his freedom of movement because that freedom is considered less important than the property rights of law-abiding citizens.

I'm not saying that I think firing smokers who smoke at home is a good idea. In fact, I think it's a pretty bad idea and would cost the company more than it could benefit the company. But I don't think it's my decision, or should be my decision, or the government's decision either. In this case, the freedom of employers to hire and fire whomsoever they please is far more important than the individual jobs of a few smokers or whether or not one company is making a good employment decision.

The sad thing is, U.S. companies are very limited in their employment freedom by a U.S. government that long ago gave up abiding by the constitution that is supposed to govern it. If a company breaks one of the many laws that govern it, it will face (almost) sure and swift and painful penalties brought by the government, but if government breaks the one simple-to-follow Law (the constitution) that governs it, who will bring consequences? Well, the problem is that no one does anymore. Used to be honest statesmen standing up for the old parchment, reminding people of their duty to the highest law in the land. Nowadays, no one stands up for the constitution unless it's a part that's particularly popular with their constituents or their most powerful special interest group.

I don't blame Mr. Farr (not his real name). He grew up (as did almost everyone else alive today) in an era of very little respect for the constitution, and most people have lost sight of what true freedom means. Too many think it means government protecting us from people (or corporations) doing things we don't like. Maybe we can turn the tide against this perverse idea of freedom, but it's going to take a lot of work, a lot of honesty, and a lot of patience.

SRS

Note: this blog entry used to be found at Backlog Bob's Blog. It no longer appears there.

Some thoughts on the word "liberal"

(I just know this going to alienate one or both of my readers.)

I was at a camp retreat over the New Year celebration time frame, and one of the persons there recommended to me the movie The Motorcycle Diaries, suggesting that it gives a good idea of who Che Guevara is. Knowing the movie's adulatory nature, I was a little surprised, and I thought "This person must be a liberal." Then, as I thought about the term, it seemed odd that it would be applied to an admirer of someone who put so many in prison (or killed them) for advocating liberty.

Recently, liberals have been objecting to the term "liberal," and some leading conservatives have tried to force them to keep it. That's bizarre. That's like forcing homosexuals to live with the term "gay" when they don't want to. I'd just as soon have the word back, and let homosexuals be called "homosexuals." As it is, I think we should take the word "liberal" back, and make a run for it before liberals realize what happened. Libertarians could save two syllables with the more etymologically correct word, and conservatives can enjoy the verbal acknowledgment their liberal economic policies and liberal views of gun control deserve. What's the downside?
Those conservatives who want to force liberals to remain known as "liberals" recognize that years of oxymoronic (and just plain moronic) liberal economic policy and illiberal "liberal" federal courts forcing states to be liberal have made the word "liberal" an insult in the American lexicon. Most of all, "liberals" have spent all their PR capital supporting Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Castro, all of whom are (or were) rather short on true liberalism, and on rapport with the American public. (The only reason Che is so popular with mainstream America is that they don't know who he is, except that he rode a motorcycle, wrote poetry, was a rebel, and above all, was just so darn cute! He's like a Latin-American James Dean plus poetry.) By uniting such foul policies and foul people with the word "liberal," American leftists have ruined the word. Like apes that consume all the food in a region and have to move on and let the land recover from their careless consumption, they have to allow the word "liberal" and its various forms recover before they can use it again. On to the word "progressive!"

SRS

Note: this blog entry used to be found at Backlog Bob's Blog. It no longer appears there.

A question

I have a question for the ages. Or for anyone reading this blog.

If someone were to base a candidacy for government office on a platform of implementing a tax on the poorest working people of society and giving the funds yielded by such a tax to some of the richest, nonworking people of society, would you vote for that candidate? Would you like that idea?

I don't.

Are you wondering how I came up with such an awful plan?

I didn't. The plan is the modern form of something Franklin Delano Roosevelt (President, United States of America), Frances Perkins (Secretary, Department of Labor), Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (Secretary, Department of the Treasury), and a host of other co-conspirators on the Committee on Economic Security and in both houses of Congress liked to call: "Social Security."

Are you asking how I can so cavalierly state that "Social Security" taxes the poorest people and moneys the richest?

Well, no one who works for anyone else is (legally) exempted from paying the 7.65% (actually 15.3%) FICA tax, no matter how poor that worker is, or how little he earns. And what he pays in his FICA tax goes straight to seasoned citzens without any limit on how wealthy the seasoned citizen can be and still receive benefits. Those who work for themselves also pay a FICA tax, except theirs is (openly) 15.3%. The self-employed who don't pay the FICA tax are those wealthy enough to afford lawyers to take advantage of tax loopholes (or, as in the case of John Edwards, are themselves wealthy lawyers).

Perhaps you're protesting that not all of those paying FICA are poor, neither are all those receiving SS benefits rich.

You're right that it would be folly to think everyone receiving SS benefits is rich, and even greater folly to think everyone paying FICA is poor, but the median net worth of those paying for "Social Security" is far below the median net worth of those receiving its benefits. Of course, these older folks have already payed off the mortgages on their homes, and with a smaller home and a lower standard of living, they could still have larger net worths than younger folks with a higher standard of living and a large income and a large mortgage bringing down their net worth. But even when you take home equity out of the equation, the over-65 crowd still trounces the under-55 crowd in net worth. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, which divided the age groups -- Under 35, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65 and up -- each into quintiles by net worth, and also factored home equity out of the equation, each quintile of the over 65 crowd has a higher net worth without their home equity than the higher quintile of the under-35 crowd with their home equity. Also, all but the lowest of the over-65 quintiles beats the under-35 quintile two quintiles higher (i.e. the second poorest quintile of those over 65 have more non-home net assets than the second richest quintile of under-35-year-olds... and by more than 300%). In fact, the over-65 age group is far wealthier than the under-35 group who will be forced to pay them well into the future.

How about abolishing social security benefits? That way you wouldn't have the moral issue of using the government to coerce the poor to fork over their money to the rich. And everyone would be a little bit freer. And the poor would be a little (no, actually a lot) richer. And posterity would no longer be slaves of wealthy retirees.

SRS

P.S. To check my facts: go to http://www.census.gov/ and run a search on "net worth age" and click on the first link that appears. The pertinent information is on pp.9-12 or so, with a very handy graph on p.11. Also go to http://www.ssa.gov/ and select "Taxes and Social Security" from the pulldown menu labeled "Questions about" and click "Go." Then click question 7 "What is the Social Security tax rate?" This is, of course, if you don't have a pay stub you can look at; for instance, if you're not into that sort of thing.

Note: this blog entry used to be found at Backlog Bob's Blog. It no longer appears there.