Of Demagogues and Big Problems

January 25, 2014 Leave a comment

One of the common tricks of demagogues, as cheap as it is common, is to denounce in high dander something for being “Big,”—“bad” because it is “Big.” Some of the recent targets have been Big Banks, Big Pharma (the drug companies), Big Oil, Big Insurance, and Big Business in general. The target is apparently chosen for its relation to the prescription that the demagogue already has in mind. Invariably the prescription involves granting more power to the demagogue, sometimes ceded from the freedoms of the targeted Big, but not infrequently taken from the liberty of the people who are somehow harmed by the Big, who are to be somehow made better by being less free.

Obamacare is one example, Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and Big Medicine all denounced to some degree in the effort to generate popular support to pass the legislation. In the end, as more and more people are recognizing, it is individual choice that has been lost, personal freedoms to choose doctors, medical plans, and available treatments (along with substantial sums of money) that have been taken, passed on to big bureaucracies identified by the demagogues.

Demagogues on left and right and even in the middle resort to this device of denouncing Big Bad, because it resonates with many people who do not consider themselves “Big” anything. We all can feel intimidated by something in our lives and experiences bigger than ourselves, making us all potentially susceptible to the demagogue’s pandering. It is also a favorite device of demagogues, because it does not require much thought or creativity to make the anti-Big speech. It seems almost required that the demagogue at some point refer to the Big Target as “Goliath” and modestly identify himself or herself with “David.” That tired jape is now getting to be about 3,000 years old, but demagogues think that their audiences just cannot get enough of it.

To be sure, there are some cases where being big is a good thing and some things that can be too big to be good. It all has to do with why they are big and perhaps how they got that way. Big savings are usually good. The Grand Canyon is big and magnificent, and I would say that the Empire StateBuilding is, too, at least as I behold it. On the other hand, big debts are to be avoided, big pits can be dangerous, and the L Tower in Toronto is an eyesore in my estimation (though I will acknowledge that others could be fond of it).

Government can be too big or too small, depending on what it does with our rights and freedoms. There are governments too small to promote and protect freedom, while there are many—most—that are too big, and ever increasing at the expense of individual rights, freedoms, and opportunities. That includes governments that are big enough to help their cronies become bigger by robbing the competition and the public. Businesses that are big because of government favor would be better for everyone if they lost the government favor and let competition, efficiency, and customer choices determine how big they should be.

Some are just big because they grew that way. Is Microsoft or Apple too big? I do not know, and neither do you. Exposed to the full discipline of the free market they will be the right size, and so will their competitors. What is the right size for banks in the United States? I do not know, and again neither do you nor does anyone else. The more that they are exposed to market forces, the sooner we will get the best answer, which I expect will be along the lines of “many sizes and shapes” in order to match the many sizes and shapes and needs of businesses, families, and individuals who rely on banks for financial services. Free competition in open markets has the power to right size commercial enterprises.

A word of caution. Part of the success of the war on Big consists in making the listeners feel small and helpless—unless rescued and led by the fearless demagogue. Besides belittling most people, the demagogue’s device diverts attention from the fact that just about everyone is part of something Big, a Big that may eventually be the demagogue’s next target. Maybe your church will one day be considered too “Big.” Or maybe the industry in which you happen to work will become a “Big” target, the town or region where you live, your race or your ethnic group, your savings and investments, the cars or trucks that you drive, your appetite, your use of water, the size of the lot of your house, the wealth of your nation. All of these, and many others, have already been used by demagogues in their Big harangues. The demagogue’s insatiable appetite for power never has enough targets. He or she is always looking for more.

Sometimes there is a kernel of something genuinely amiss in the demagogue’s Big complaint. Often, when you boil down the genuine substance of any of the complaints to the hard facts, it is hard to discover what is the Big Deal—at least in the problem. The Big Deal is to be found in the solution, which is what the demagogue is really after. Were the Popes in Rome really controlling the lives and governments of England in the time of Henry VIII? No, but the solution of confiscating Catholic Church properties and awarding them to the King’s cronies was a very Big Deal. The Nazi demagogues in Germany played the same game with their own people, the German Jews, and with their property and possessions.

The demagogue’s solutions, resting upon emotion and panic, seldom solve anything and often lead to more problems. The Climate Wars—one year the coming ice age, the next year global warming, today just climate “change”—is an example we have all seen unfold, inflicting untold billions of dollars of costs while enriching favored cronies, but which in even the most enthusiastic promises of the demagogues will do little to affect the climate in reality in our lifetimes.

The next time you hear a public figure fume about something being Big, carefully inquire into and focus upon what he or she is after. You may be a target just Big enough.

Filed under anarchy, banking, Catholicism, demagoguery, environmentalism, freedom, global warming, government, healthcare, markets, private property, rights, statism, too-big-to-fail, wealth Tagged with

Of Man and God’s Work

January 12, 2014 2 Comments


Photo by Mitchell Maglio on Unsplash

On the sacred mountain, made sacred by the personal presence of the Divine, Moses spoke face to face with God, without whom “was not any thing made that was made.” (John 1:3) Moses beheld in vision the many creations of God and many worlds on which God had placed His children, much as with this creation. The Lord explained to Moses that, “as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words.” (Moses 1:38)

That creative work is what God does and has been doing and will continue to do. Then God explained to Moses the “Why” behind it all:

For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. (Moses 1:39)

That is to say that what God does is entirely purposeful, the “what” of His work intrinsically tied to the “Why.” And why He does what He does, and what He does, is all related to man. We are His children, and the Father is literally our Father. On the morning of His resurrection, the Father’s firstborn son, Jesus Christ, declared to Mary Magdalene, “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father” (John 20:17). The Son was speaking literally not figuratively.

Our Heavenly Father is more interested in our growth and progress than even the most loving earthly parents are in the growth and progress of their children. His happiness is connected with our happiness and progress, His “job satisfaction” derived from our moral improvement. That improvement, in turn, comes from the righteous exercise of our freedom to choose and do good.

The exercise of our choice is all that we can give to God that He does not have, and He will not deprive us of that power of choice. He will not take it, because by doing so our “choice” becomes worthless to Him. It is the fullest and therefore richest exercise of that freedom that He seeks and applies His own effort to empower and encourage and protect. To diminish our freedom is to diminish its worth to Him. Compelled virtue is no virtue at all and has no value to the Father or to His children. By choosing good in an environment where we may select evil we become good; by living virtuously among full opportunities to embrace vice we become virtuous. Through that process—with the free gift of the Savior to retrieve us, upon conditions of repentance, from evil choices—we expand our freedom, rejecting all that would enslave us. In so doing we qualify for God’s ultimate gift, eternal life.

That is the process and what life is all about. God devotes His attention to creating the necessary environment and conditions for our eternal progression. Then He stays involved to help each of us as much as we will allow. His love for us extended to the sacrificial offering of His Beloved Son, Jesus Christ, who used His own free will to rescue us out of the depths of evil if we would apply what choice we may have left to turn with all our hearts away from darkness toward light.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

This being God’s work and His glory, He cares very much about what we do that affects that work and glory. That is also to say that nothing else we do matters to Him. It is only in the context of His work for our immortality and eternal life that anything we do really matters. God is probably not very interested in whether we buy the blue car or the white car, per se, as it has little bearing on immortality and eternal life. God could be interested, however, if we choose to buy the blue car after agreeing beforehand with our spouse to buy the white one, as unity in marriage matters a great deal to our eternal progress, as does keeping promises.

All of this begs the question, if something does not matter to God, should it matter much to us? In fact, paying excessive attention to the minutiae and distractions of life can become a big deal, if doing so draws our time and effort away from what truly drives virtue.

Customs and traditions can do this very thing. Consider the recent Christmas season. Were there little things, maybe many little things, that competed for your focus on Christ and the commemoration of His mission, and the many good works that the Christmas season offered? Customs and traditions can do that if we are not careful.

The Savior, during his mortal ministry in Galilee and Judea, frequently pointed the people to their traditions that interfered with what He called the “weightier matters”, such as “judgment, mercy, and faith”. He called that straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel (Matthew 23:23, 24). Do we not see a similar error in the political correctness of today that raises an uproar over a stray word—no matter how ugly—while embracing all varieties of immorality and family destruction?

God’s work is all related to us, because we are related to Him. Knowing God’s work, and making it our work, may be as important and valuable for us today as it was for Moses in his time. I suspect so.

Filed under atonement, Christmas, creation, divine nature, Easter, eternal life, faith, family, freedom, Jesus Christ, life, marriage, media, morality, Moses, repentance, salvation, works

Of Closed Governments and Coming Together

January 9, 2014 Leave a comment

Battered and bruised and stretched and torn, our Constitution still has life in it. One of its central principles is that no one person can do much by himself in Washington, for good or ill. We are watching that play out in this year’s appropriations process. We see that it is impossible for one man, the President, to make a new law. It is similarly impossible for one House of Congress, whether Senate or House of Representatives, to do so alone.

Under the Constitution, all appropriations bills must originate in the House of Representatives, where they are given their initial shape and substance. Next, the Senate must concur or amend. If the Senate chooses to amend, the bill goes back to the House, which can either agree to the Senate amendment, disagree, or disagree with a further amendment. If there is disagreement, representatives from House and Senate can meet to resolve those differences. If they do and succeed, then each House, first one and then the other, passes the bill, after which it is sent on to the President.

It is still not a new law. According to the Constitution, the President may not amend the bill that has passed both Houses of the Congress. He can choose to sign it, making it a law. It does not become a law unless he does. He can choose to veto it. In the latter case it goes back to the Congress, where it can only become law if both Houses override the President’s veto.

I lay this process out in some detail, because to listen to the institutional media and most of the pundits you might think that they have all forgotten, or never learned, how the constitutional process of making laws works. It is not an easy process. In fact it was meant to be difficult. Some seem to wish it were easy, at least for enacting the policies that they favor. They would wish to make one or more constitutional parties to law making redundant and of no separate account or purpose other than to do the will of their favorite other. They should, instead, take comfort that it is easier to defeat policies that they oppose.

The genius of the Constitution for making laws is that it requires three separate parties of people, sometimes with very different views, to come together to make anything a law. The Founders made it difficult because they were not very fond of new laws. They knew that an abundance of laws could mean a scarcity of freedom. And so it is today, but it has taken over 200 years to build up the awesome pile of laws that regulate so much of our lives, and yet it still is harder to make a new law than many would wish.

Our Constitution requires that a lot of people have to work together to make a new law. When they do not, nothing happens. That is why much of the federal government has run out of money and has “shut down.” A new law is needed to appropriate the money for these shuttered parts of the federal government to open.

They will continue to be without operating money until the elected representatives in the House and Senate and the President work together to make a new law. The Constitution forces them to work together. Nothing will happen until they do, whether that takes a day, a week, or longer. The Constitution requires sufficient cooperation for law making. For either House, or Senate, or President to be able to make laws without the other would impose the tyranny of one set of views over the rest. The Constitution will not allow that. The Constitution forces a meeting of the minds, either by persuasion or by compromise, or in practice some of both.

The Constitution is a beautiful thing. I rejoice in it. I can be patient for a while as it does its work and forces our elected leaders to come together. The issue is not keeping parks open. The issue is preserving our freedom and our society. The Constitution still has some power to do that.

(First published October 1, 2013)

Filed under civilization, Congress, Constitution, freedom, government, House of Representatives, law, media, patience, rule of law, Senate, tyranny

Of Minorities and Society

December 21, 2013 2 Comments

The saddest chapters of history chronicle the breakdown of human society. Rights are abused, the innocent—if innocence is allowed to exist—are trampled. Poverty, hatred, violence, and uncontrolled human passion prevail. Destruction and degradation, physical and moral, replace human progress.

All society, except that of master to slave, relies upon an element of free association. Societies may have more or less elements of coercion as well, but it is the element of free association that allows the society to continue, that motivates its members to acquiesce in or even encourage the society’s continuation. Free, voluntary association is what gives a society its legitimacy. Without it, there is no society, just a group of people ruled by one coterie of thugs or another.

Cooperation in society cannot be taken for granted. When it is, when free cooperation, instead of being nurtured and encouraged, is replaced by coercive rules and compulsion, particularly rules and compulsion designed to benefit some at the expense of others, society declines, people interact more by will of others than by their own volition. With time either the situation is redressed or the society disintegrates, often to be conquered from the outside when its internal strength has turned to weakness.

In its latter years imperial China was prey to numerous foreign incursions because its society was a mighty empty shell, old traditions surrounding an empire of competing warlords. Ancient Greece, which twice when united proved too much for the Persian empire, became relatively easy prey to the Romans after the ties of Greek society had become tired and weak. Rome, in its turn, after a thousand years, was enormously wealthy but mightily weak in the internal strength to repel the roaming barbarians, vibrant societies powerful in their own internal cohesion. Much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America today remains mired in poverty from the inability of relatively young countries to develop cooperative societies that encourage the generation of wealth and its application to promote prosperity for the present and for the future.

With cooperation at the core of successful society, one would think that democracies must be the most successful. History records otherwise. There are no historical examples of a successful democracy, at least not one that lasted for long enough to matter. Like a match set to paper, democracies flare up brightly into power and glory but all too soon die away to ashes.

The problem with democracies has been that all too quickly the majority in the democracy learns that it can become wealthy by robbing the minority, under camouflage of statutes and government. That only lasts until either the minority successfully rebels, becomes a majority in its turn, or the wealth of the minority is exhausted. In reaction, the majority may seek to preserve its advantages by yielding to a dictator—a “mouth” for the majority—to govern in the name of the majority to discern and express its will. Few of these dictators have resisted the temptation to wear the mask of the majority to govern for the benefit of themselves and their cronies. That has been the case for every communist government, without exception.

But, is it not right and just for the majority to prevail? Perhaps, but to prevail over what? Everything? Consider: if majority rule is applied to deprive the minority of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, why should the minority cooperate? All that such society offers them is slavery, unrequited labor and service to fill another’s belly and pockets. In a pure democracy, there is no check on majority avarice, no refuge for the minority. The majority must always have its way.

Republics, however, are built upon a foundation of minority rights. Republican governments are granted only limited powers, exercised by representatives of the people, within boundaries beyond which the government may not go. A written constitution serves to enshrine and strengthen those rights against violation by the majority. The system gives a stake to all—not just the current rulers—in the continuation and strengthening of the society. No democracy, hereditary monarchy, or dictatorship can provide that.

In a nation as great and diverse as the United States everyone is part of a minority. Whether we consider age, ethnic background, religion, geography, culture, profession, or a multitude of other distinctions, we are a host of minorities. We can only come together and remain as a nation, strong and vibrant, if we are confident of protection in our minority rights, for protecting minority rights in America means protecting everyone’s rights. That is why the Founders proposed and the nation embraced a Republic formed on a federal structure of divided and limited government.

In that context, what are we to make of the current direction of American society? Are we preserving the Republic? Does our society feel like it is coming together? Recent public opinion polls find that more than 60% of Americans believe the nation to be going in the wrong direction. In another poll, a mere 22% believe that the current government rules with the consent of the governed.

What is the national political leadership doing about this? We have a President who aggressively pursues a variety of programs that have in common the taking of wealth from one minority segment of the nation to reward others. These wealth transfers are lionized for the undenied purpose of political and electoral advantage for the President and his supporters.

You will recognize the pattern. A crisis is discovered by the President, and an industry or group is demonized in public speeches and echoed in the establishment media as causing the problem and/or standing in the way of its solution. A plan is announced that involves confiscations from the demonized industry or group to fund benefices bestowed on Administration favorites.

Consider a few examples of many. Global warming is hailed as an imminent crisis with disastrous consequences; the coal, oil, and gas industries are identified as the foes of progress; and a variety of taxes and other restrictive policies are proposed, together with planned subsidies for businesses and companies favored by the White House. Banks are declared to be the nefarious forces behind the recent recession, new laws and regulations are applied that confiscate billions of dollars from the industry, much of which is then channeled to hedge funds and other political allies of the administration. Some millions of people are discovered to be without health insurance, doctors and the health insurance industry—among others—are fingered as being at the root of the problem, so a major overhaul of the entire structure of the health system is enacted that favors some at the expense of others. Administration cronies receive lucrative contracts to develop and administer the new system. There are many other examples, large and small, in education, welfare, housing, transportation, law enforcement, and many other government programs.

Is there any wonder that there is gridlock in the national government, when policy after policy is aimed at transferring wealth from some to reward others? Where is the room for cooperation and compromise, when the issue is how much of your family’s wealth is to be taken and given to someone else? The Roman Republic fell into gridlock after decades of appeals to mass acclaim for schemes of popular distribution of public plunder. It ended in the triumph of the Caesars, and later their eventual fall to the barbarians. It is perilous to abuse social comity.

President Obama has announced the transfer of wealth to be the chief focus for the remaining three years of his administration. Can our society weather that?

Filed under America, banking, Barack Obama, benevolence, China, communism, Constitution, demagoguery, democracy, federalism, freedom, global warming, government, healthcare, politics, republics, rights, Rome, slavery, tyranny, wealth

Of Personality and Order

November 26, 2013 Leave a comment

While making no personal claims to psychological insight, I have found great value in the Jung-Myers approach to understanding human personalities. Part of that approach identifies four major personality temperaments toward which each of us gravitates to one degree or another. The work of Carl Jung and Isabel Myers—and many others building on that work—has elaborated the theory that in the world of people there is a variety of personalities all interacting and contributing to the social richness of humanity. None of these four temperaments is “right” or “wrong.” They are just different, and that difference is valuable and, moreover, worthy of understanding so that we can get along better in our interactions with each other.

I have seen all four of these temperaments in my small family of a mere 7 souls. I consider the variety enriching to our family more than frustrating. This insight has helped me understand where my children are coming from when I might otherwise think that any one of them has been replaced by a space alien.

Using that framework and watching my fellow travelers through life over decades of interaction, I have personally found it useful to describe the four temperaments in the following way, with regard to each person’s approach to his environment, or the world around us.

• First (in no order of priority or relative value), there are those who come to grips with their world by seeking to be in harmony with their environment. My wife is in this category.

• Second, there are those who primarily seek to enjoy their environment. I believe that two of my daughters are in this group.

• Third are those who seek to organize their environment. I think that I would consider myself as being in this group, along with perhaps a son and a daughter.

• And a fourth group would be those who seek to protect themselves from their environment. I believe that one of my sons would be found here.

Again, I emphasize that no temperament is better than the other. They are just different. And we need them all. Moreover, some of each can be found in the attitudes of any one of us from time to time. The point is which approach is dominant in the way we each live our lives. Together, they all contribute to the success of our society. That is to say, that whatever our temperament, we rely upon our brothers and sisters who have different temperaments to help make us and our society complete.

I do not consider this to be an accidental development but an essential element of God’s plan for the society of His children. In several places in the scriptures God reminds us of the variety of gifts that He has given, emphasizing that we can and need to embrace and profit from each gift, all taken together. “For the body is not one member, but many,” the Apostle Paul explained, and no part of the body can say to the other, “I have no need of thee” (see 1 Corinthians 12:14-21).

But does not all of this difference lead to disunity and perhaps even chaos? It can, and has, but it does not need to. Any personality trait, any temperament, any gift, if taken to the extreme or out of balance can result in harm to others. There are plenty of examples in the long history of mankind of one taking advantage over another, either into anarchy or tyranny. This is one of the structural failings of absolute monarchy or dictatorship, where too much of the society is guided by one person and his or her approach to the world. The temptation to fit all of the people into that mold is natural and hard for the dictator to resist (if he even recognizes it). On the other hand, there would be chaos if all had full license to live their preferences in disregard of others.

Many of the commandments of God are intended to help us to keep our differences in balance and to maintain the close society that allows us to be fully enriched by one another. One of the chapters in The Book of Mormon explains this process as being the establishment of order by means of the ordinances of God (see Alma chapter 13). The similarity in the words is not accidental.

Entering into the kingdom of God is nothing more nor less than making a solemn covenant—pledged and witnessed by the physical ordinance of baptism by immersion—to accept God’s commandments for a society of order as defined by God, an order that accommodates all human gifts and temperaments and organizes them into an harmonious whole. The two greatest commandments of the kingdom of God are to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves (see Matthew 22:37-39). In this system there are universal standards to bind us to one another by binding ourselves to our Savior Jesus Christ, who sacrificed to give us all the freedom to choose and be what those choices make us.

This verse from Alma chapter 13 describes the matter this way:

Now these ordinances were given after this manner, that thereby the people might look forward on the Son of God, it being a type of his order, or it being his order, and this that they might look forward to him for a remission of their sins, that they might enter into the rest of the Lord. (Alma 13:16)

Within the Savior’s order of peace there is full room to be at harmony with one’s environment, to enjoy it, in a well organized whole, where all are safe and at rest from fear. Indeed, in the Kingdom of God is the one place where we all can have it all. There is nowhere else like it for any of us.

(First published April 27, 2013)

Filed under abundant life, anarchy, baptism, civilization, commandments, covenants, family, freedom, individual worth, Jesus Christ, ordinances, organized religion, peace, personality, The Book of Mormon, tyranny

Of Washington and the Life of the Nation

November 22, 2013 1 Comment

Washington, D.C., is a strange place. I speak from experience. My whole working career has been in Washington. In many meetings with people visiting Washington I have explained to them that Washington is not America. Few have been surprised by the remark. In many visits away from Washington (and in connection with my work I accept nearly every invitation to leave town and be among those whose lives too many in Washington try to run) I am ever and powerfully reminded how different the rest of America is from Washington. I have not been surprised. Kansas City is much closer to America than Washington ever was or will be.

In support of the point I offer a few painful examples. I see one each day that I drive into the city. Looking at the cars around me I note that very few are more than a few years old. At the same time I am impressed by how many of the cars are foreign luxury models. It is typical, when paused at a stop light, to notice that many of the surrounding cars are BMWs, Mercedes, Lexus, Acuras, Audis, and not an insignificant number of Jaguars, high end Range Rovers, and Porsches. I also see a lot more Prius cars and other hybrids. This is not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with driving any of these or any other late model high-priced cars. I merely note it as very different from what I see when paused at a typical traffic light in other cities and towns in America.

As an aside, I am grateful to the people who buy and drive a Prius or other model of hybrid, because they subsidize my purchase of gasoline. Their cars do use less gasoline (though not enough less to compensate their owners for paying so much more for their cars), leaving more for people like me who drive regular gasoline-consuming vehicles. That reduction in gasoline demand helps reduce the price.

The Prius drivers might be offended were I to tell them, however, that I am entirely unimpressed by their conspicuous token of environmental sensitivity. Their purchase and operation of a Prius, after all, is very likely more harmful to the environment than is my more conventional automobile. First of all, they pay $10,000 or more extra to buy their hybrid, and if the price system works at all efficiently that means that making a Prius or other hybrid consumes far more in resources than making a conventional car. Second, the hybrid car fans and their coteries in the D.C. area have convinced the masters of the highway networks to create special less-traveled commuter lanes that the hybrid drivers are permitted to use, meaning that they reduce the efficiency of the highway infrastructure. So, to the Prius drivers of the world I say, thanks for the subsidy, but save your enviro lectures for when you are looking in the mirror.

The automobiles of the nation’s capital region are a sign of an even more painful reality of how Washington is different from the rest of America. It is also the wealthiest part of the nation, by far. On April 25, 2013, Forbes magazine published an article about the richest counties in the United States in terms of average income (Tom Van Riper, “America’s Richest Counties”). Six of the ten richest counties are in the Washington, D.C. region, including the top two and one more out of the top five. While recession lingers in the rest of the nation, Washington and its suburbs are doing rather well, with unemployment down to 5.5%, well below the national average.

I will also say that I am not opposed to wealth and wealthy people. I wish all of the world to be wealthier and rejoice that it is far wealthier today than people of just a few generations ago could have dreamed. But we could all live so much better still. I ache that the policies of governments around the world stifle economic growth and development and hold so many of their people down in poverty. The poor nations of the world are not poor because their people are less talented and intelligent than others, but because their governments are so oppressive and have been for generations.

Therein lies my beef with the wealth of Washington and its environs and the key to its estrangement from America. That wealth is hard to explain from the perspective of value added to the rest of the nation. Washington is basically a one-company town. Unlike other one-company towns, however, it produces little that adds enough value to the lives of others that would allow it to prosper in open competition in free markets. The product of Washington instead is forced upon the rest of the nation, whose productive income is confiscated to keep the Washington wealth-eating machine going.

Try to name an economic product or activity that is not somehow subject to special handling by or permission from someone in Washington or controlled from Washington. After the Dodd-Frank Act, for example, all financial activities have become more subject to direction by Washington bureaucrats than ever before. Today, a bank has to pay more attention to its regulators than it does to its customers. Who gets the best attention out of that arrangement? The same is true for energy producers, communications firms, health care providers, and you can continue the list. All that special handling comes with a toll, payable in taxes, or borrowed from the financial markets, or layered upon private incentive and individual initiative. Today in Washington the most convincing argument for new rules and laws is to announce that something is “unregulated.” When you regulate liberty, how much liberty survives? How much of America survives?

Next year, 2014, will mark the 200th anniversary of the burning of Washington by the British in the War of 1812. The curious thing about the burning of Washington was that it did not make a lick of difference. The rest of the nation went on about its business, little harmed or even affected. The same was true during the Revolutionary War when the British occupied Philadelphia. Rather than end the war it did nothing to bring the British victory. In America the nation was not run by its government, and in fact government was mostly irrelevant to the daily life of the people. That was very different from European experience, where nations were so dominated by their rulers that capturing the capital was tantamount to beheading the country.

Washington is strange to America. That can be tolerable, but only if it is smaller and less significant. Let the real nation draw its life from the people and live where they live their lives without direction from their rulers. Let us have a Washington whose disappearance would not mean much to the rest of the nation.

(First published May 18, 2013)

Filed under America, banking, Dodd-Frank Act, economic growth, environmentalism, exceptionalism, federalism, freedom, government, poverty, productivity, rule of law, socialism, statism, taxes, tyranny, Washington, wealth

Of Limited Freedom and Limited Government

November 17, 2013 1 Comment

I live and work near the belly of the beast, and I can report that these days he is not happy. His belly is rumbling. He has eaten more than he can digest. Watch out, he may throw up. He is already belching.

The federal government is not working, we know and see. Not only is it not working as was intended when it was created by the States, it is not working as designed and over designed in subsequent years. The federal government cannot manage the national parks, the welfare system is breaking down, the national transportation infrastructure takes in more money and yet the signs of dysfunction and decay on roads, rails, and bridges are increasingly apparent. Banks are regulated with thousands of rules while the banking industry continues to shrink: we have fewer banks today than we did in 1891, and their share of the financial markets has been dwindling for decades. So much of what the federal government touches turns to rust and ruin.

Yet the federal government keeps reaching out for more, undeterred by its failures. The Environmental Protection Agency aggressively imposes restrictions on the air we exhale, the Food and Drug Administration announces plans to control the fat in our foods, the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection has decided what kind of mortgages lenders can make and what kind of people can get them (acknowledging that many who qualify today will be outside the boundaries of federal standards in 2014).

You can augment this brief sampling of a longer list from your own experiences. This is nothing new, other than perhaps in frequency and intensity. If there is a virtue in Obamacare it may be that its unworkability and its increasingly universal hurt are demonstrating broadly what many have been feeling individually.

Demonstrating the hurt is not the same as redressing it. The beast, however ill, will not cheerfully surrender its prey. During the debate over ratification of the Constitution, one commenter, writing in the Philadelphia newspaper Independent Gazetteer (October 12, 1787), observed, “People once possessed of power are always loth to part with it”, and then warned that the Feds could not be counted on, by their own volition, to do “any thing which shall derogate from their own authority and importance . . . or give back to the people any part of those privileges which they have once parted with”. If that was predictable in 1787, it is painfully apparent today. Perhaps the clearest example is how the Washington power elites have exempted themselves and their cronies from the application of Obamacare while continuing to inflict it on the rest.

And yet, Obamacare is the hurt that keeps on hurting. People will not get over it or get used to it. Its pain and suffering will be felt again and again with each new illness, every new tax, as its strictures reduce availability, affordability, and quality of wellbeing. Wave after wave of new harm will come, astonishing its supporters and augmenting the ranks of its victims until it is addressed.

Americans, much like other people, will put up with much before they are roused to action. Unlike for many other people, our Constitution gives us avenues for action. The Constitution embodies the concept of continual redress within the rule of law to make appeal to extremities outside of the rule of law unnecessary and unthinkable, so long as the principles of the Constitution retain their vitality.

The core principle of the Constitution is limited government, designed to protect the growth and expansion of human freedom. Increasingly, for about a century, the “progressives” in Washington have turned public affairs on their heads. Human freedom has been the focus of limitation, while government enjoyed constant growth and expansion. The end seems approaching, either of the ability of government to manage what it has taken on, or perhaps (and hopefully) when the holders of power can no longer convince enough people that it is all for their own good. Limitation on government may return in vogue as promises of government solutions to feed the beast ring ever more hollow.

The Philadelphia writer of 1787, whom I cited above, was a critic of the Constitution, because he believed it impossible that the power gathered in by the federal government could be wrested from its hands. I remain hopeful that it still can be. Nothing else will work.

Filed under banking, Constitution, environmentalism, federalism, freedom, government, healthcare, progressives, rule of law, statism, tyranny, Washington Tagged with

Of Borrowing and Saving

November 8, 2013 Leave a comment

The basic rule is, if you are not already saving, then you are not ready to borrow. This may sound paradoxical, but it is the only safe way to approach borrowing.

You may wonder, if I have savings, then why would I borrow? That question may be answered in any number of ways. Asking it suggests some lack of understanding of the proper purpose of borrowing.

The proper purpose of borrowing is to manage your income. You should never borrow to spend beyond your income.

Most people receive income in lumps, like once a month or twice a month. Expenses do not always behave themselves that way. First, there are the every day expenses, such as for food, transportation, and a wide range of miscellaneous minor expenditures that quickly add up. Then there are other expenses that occur monthly and may more or less happen at about the same time as your income. A third category is the big expenditure, that may come once or twice a year, such as tuition, taxes, major purchases, insurance premiums. Since the timing of our income and outgo often do not line up, we use borrowing to help bring the two into line.

For example, the tuition is due in September, but you plan to pay for college by working through the school year. A student loan or other borrowing arrangement with the college can line your income up with the expense.

Another example might involve a big appliance. Your refrigerator breaks down and you need a new one. You may not usually have several hundred dollars of unallocated income available in any one month to pay for the new refrigerator, but you likely will over the course of a year. Borrowing lets you draw that income from the course of the year into your current month and match it against this large purchase needed today.

Here is a bigger example. You need a new car, both for family transportation and perhaps even for travel to work. Very few people have enough ready income to buy the new car with what will be received in any one month. Most people, though, can draw upon funds available from their income over the course of a few years to pay for the car, and borrowing is the tool that they can use to do that.

Of course, this borrowing from the future to pay for something today can be abused. There is a natural temptation common to man to seek gratification today and worry about tomorrow’s problems tomorrow, even while causing them today. Two things can help counter this potential for abuse. One is interest, and the other is saving.

Interest is what we pay for borrowing. While rewarding the lender, it is a penalty against anyone who borrows in order to spend beyond his income. As you spend beyond your income, the interest mounts. In the end, it will bring down the abuser once the abuse has gone too far and gets out of hand.

Saving is a more benign and effective check on the impulse to borrow in order to spend beyond income. If you are regularly saving, you are doing something even more important than preparing for the future and reaping the rewards from lending to other borrowers. By definition, if you are saving, you are living within your income. You are taking part of your income and putting it aside. That discipline is what is needed to prevent you from using borrowing to exceed your income. You have a proven practice of spending less than you earn.

That is why I say that if you are saving, then you are prepared to borrow, and if you are not saving, then you are either living right on the edge—spending your income as fast as it is received—or you are going beyond, borrowing to spend beyond what you earn, and that leads to trouble. Then you will be spending to consume something that you did not earn and do not deserve. The eventual price for that is loss of freedom, as you must in the future consume much less than you earn in order to satisfy the debts.

(First published September 8, 2008)

Filed under abundant life, banking, compensation, deficit spending, discipline, freedom, interest rates, money, personal finance, slavery

Of Democracies and Demagogues

November 5, 2013 2 Comments

The demagogue has ever been the bane of democracies. By definition, democracies rest upon the choices of the people. When wisdom guides, democracies prosper. As history shows, wisdom does not always prevail, and it never does when demagogues do. Since the demagogue seeks his own power by taking power from others, once the people give him their voice they will be hard-pressed to get their power back; the democracy deteriorates into dictatorship, invoked in the name but never the reality of the rights of the people.

Why would a free people yield their power to the tyranny of the demagogue? It is not reasonable to place your own hands and feet in fetters. In every successful democracy there is a balance between reason and emotion. Rather than advise wisdom, demagogues appeal to the basest popular emotions to overcome reason. American Founder, James Madison, drawing lessons from the best known democracy of history, the democracy of Athens, warned Americans of the danger:

In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.
(James Madison, Federalist no. 55, as quoted in John Samples, “James Madison’s Vision of Liberty,” Cato Policy Report, Vol.XXIII No.2, March/April 2001, p.12)

Madison recognized that in groups fiery emotion can make for a more persuasive pitch than cooler reason can. He recommended the Constitution as a defense against demagogues, a structure of fundamental limitations on government and against those who would seek to govern by preying upon the passions of the people. The formula has worked and the Constitution has held—against many trials, including a Civil War—for more than 200 years.

The typical demagogue is a forceful speaker who seeks power by stirring up the people, whom he sees as masses to be manipulated and managed rather than as a body politic of reasonable individuals. It does not particularly matter which emotions are invoked against reason; the most successful demagogues draw upon a variety. Perhaps the emotion most powerful to the ends of the demagogue is fear, but he will also use hatred, avarice, envy, sorrow, vanity, vengeance, vainglory, among others. He will even try to invoke love, though love is hard to make compatible with the demagogue’s message of contention, but it can be used to garner sympathy and to get people to let down their guard against an appeal to baser emotions.

Are Americans and the American constitutional democracy perpetually proof against the demagoguery that has destroyed democracies before? The Founders did not think so. A popular watch phrase among them was, “eternal vigilance is the price we pay for liberty”. They were referring more to internal dangers than dangers from foreign enemies.

How do we keep watch on the threshold of the 21st Century? Here are ten tests to help unmask the demagogue:

• He gives powerful, emotional speeches, as public speaking is one of his most powerful tools. “Facts” will usually play a minor role in the speech, and when used will often either be half-truths or outright lies, sometimes very big lies with passionate appeal.

• As discussed, emotion rather than reason predominates in his arguments, with fear the most prevalent emotion.

• He conjures up apocalyptic dangers and manipulates crises (and creates them when none are readily available). The sky seems to be always about to fall.

• Riding on the wave of crisis, he will offer sweeping “action plans” that would cede to him major powers and authorities and push aside sources of opposition. “Forward” is the frequent cry shouted to drown out objections, “the debate is over.” (In a real democracy, can the debate ever be “over”?)

• He dishonors the Constitution and violates it without regret; the Constitution and demagoguery are incompatible. Neither can survive while the other prospers, to paraphrase J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter formula for her fictional demagogue.

• He accuses others of employing his own despicable tactics. In order to create fog and camouflage, and blunt criticism of his own actions, the demagogue will often claim opponents are lying, fomenting contention, engaging in petty partisanship, and so on, all the while employing those tactics himself. Note that the accusations will usually employ an appeal to sentiment.

• He points to enemies of the people, enemies that his plans will vanquish. These enemies are usually chosen to evoke emotion, such as “big business” to foster fear, “the rich” to stir envy, race or ethnic divisions to feed hate.

• He calls for unity while proposing plans that divide the nation, opponents of his plans being cast as those who would seek to divide a nation that would be unified by agreeing with him. Issues are chosen that find and feed emotional fissures in public opinion. Most effective, the demagogue will propose to take something of value from a group in a minority and “share” it with the group whose favor he seeks, such as targeted taxes or confiscations to provide some popular benefit.

• Following on that point, he develops classes of supporters dependent upon what he promises to give them from the government, benefits that will need his continued care to be sustained. That is what lies at the core of the difficulty in fixing problems with welfare, Medicare, and Social Security, and why the demagogues have a field day when anyone offers reasonable proposals to deal with these very real issues.

• He hates a free and independent press that raises objections of fact and evidence to challenge the emotional appeal, but he loves an obliging press that magnifies his message and drowns out dissident appeals to reason.

It is not hard to recognize demagogues among us today appealing for ascendancy. Democracy in our day demands that we retain our freedom and that we do not yield. More than our freedom is in the balance, but our freedom is in the balance.

(First published August 12, 2012)

Filed under America, Civil War, civilization, Constitution, deception, demagoguery, democracy, dictatorship, elections, freedom, individual worth, media, politics, rights, slavery, taxes, tyranny, unity

Of Mountains and Forever

November 2, 2013 Leave a comment

They say that the mountains of the East are far older than the mountains of the West and at one time were just as lofty. Over ages and ages the Appalachian Mountains have been worn down by wind and rain and the other engines of change, their substance contributing to much of the land on which many of the people of the southeastern United States today live and where generations before them cleared the land, built their homes, and at length departed.

The sugary white beach sands of Florida’s Emerald Coast are said to be uncountable grains of quartz eroded from the mountains far to the north. The cities of Wilmington, Delaware; Baltimore, Maryland; Washington, D.C.; Richmond, Virginia; Raleigh, North Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; Macon, Georgia; Montgomery, Alabama; and numerous others are outposts along the “Fall Line” of the eastern seaboard, marking where the ocean once met the land and where eons later waterfalls and rapids set the limit that colonial ships could travel up the rivers. All of the land between these cities and today’s coast was created from the rocks of the timelessly ancient Appalachians.

And yet these mountains are still majestic for all of that wear and tear. The clouds ever cling to the Smoky Mountains, while in Virginia, as the Blue Ridge, the mountains rise as the rocky fence that for the early colonists divided the new land between what they called east and west.

I recently spent a week in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, on the western side of the Smokies. In the morning the view of Mt. LeConte and other towering peaks greeted me, and at night they fed evening reverie.

Each evening of the week the family gathered for a devotional on a wide porch with that marvelous view as our backdrop. Each adult family member, often helped by a younger participant, took a turn leading us in song, prayer, scripture study, and a spiritual message. Spiritual thoughts came easy in that setting. On one evening in full twilight I called upon the setting for my visual aid.

The mountains of the East are distinguished by being blanketed in forest framing the occasional meadow, with very infrequent exposed rock. I drew attention to the forest covering, noting that among the woodland growth there were a fair number of trees shorn of every leaf—long dead. I remarked that all of the living trees that we saw would die in turn, and that the mountains themselves were steadily disappearing, imperceptibly wearing away. We live in a world that of itself is a world of steady decay, with no earthly exceptions.

And then the point of the message (with little ones in attendance you have to reach the point soon enough): each one of us is older than the mountains before us. Our Heavenly Father told us long before time all about this world and His plan for us here while we lived in His presence in His eternal home that preexisted the earth. From that eternal world we were sent to a world where all was change and where decay prevailed. This temporary world is our learning, growing, and testing ground, where we have full freedom to choose who and what we want to become.

Into this world of death and decay Jesus Christ was sent by His Father and our Father to redeem every good thing, including (most of all) those who would choose to rely upon His power and grace to become good and be brought back into the eternal worlds of the Father’s presence. All good, all beauty, all loveliness of this world would be saved by Christ and amplified where moth and rust do not corrupt. That was the power that Christ the Redeemer won by His atoning sacrifice. As beautiful and great as the view before us, Christ came that we might rise above and lay claim forever to it all, losing nothing worth keeping. Most of all, that included especially all of us gathered on that porch and our eternal relationship as family.

And that was the lesson of the mountains and the forests before us, presented in fewer words. But the truth of the message lingers and will not wear away.

(First published June 25, 2013)

Filed under abundant life, atonement, children, creation, death, divine nature, eternal life, family, freedom, future, heaven, Heavenly Father, home, Jesus Christ, life, mortality, premortal life, resurrection, salvation, spirituality, time

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