Eric’s Blog

Do you know what stupid is? Stupid is anyone not educated enough to believe absurd and irrational ideas fed to people who think they are smart by people who think they are smarter. Unfortunately for smart and smarter everything they know fails any test of practical application because… let’s face it, practical application sounds like the kind of work and proof sounds like the kind of record keeping that is frankly below smart people.

When I was young I given IQ tests. The first was in the third grade. Growing up in remote Alaska I was home schooled in first and most of second grades. When I was placed into a social circumstance I was utterly unprepared, something other children quickly picked up on and had their fun with. My saving grace was that I was the biggest kid in my class and so while I was completely unaware of social intimidation I was physically intimidating nonetheless. Actually my social ineptitude was a bonus because when kids tried to pick fights with me and I tossed them around like rag dolls. I thought they were playing and they thought I was insane. As for my IQ, there was a lot of excited muttering among adults and I was told that I should not be flunking.

As it turned out my biggest problem through most of school was being horribly bored and uninterested in most things. By the time I was a teen my mom was studying psychology and gave me an IQ test. I was well into genius. Later I was sent to counseling and some fat guy in a 1950s suit and haircut looked like he was going to freak out giving me an IQ test. I had two weeks to drill for that one and acted as stupid as I could to entertain myself. Years later I found people not as smart as me able to sail past me with ease. I believed my intelligence would compensate for as much slacking off as I wanted. I learned that it is all about doing the work.

One of the things I did professionally was work on medical equipment in field service. I learned that doctors thought MD stood for medical diety. Later I found many doctors practicing decades ago had only a few hours of nutrition training, yet I have since learned that in many ways food is the first medicine as our bodies replace most cells every 28 days. Most highly educated doctors have more in common with soldiers than scientists. They are highly regimented and conditioned to a diagnostic pattern that has far more to do with rote conditioning than rational thought.

Bear with me here. I have a point. Education can expand your thinking by challenging you to defend or evaluate a position. However that is a difficult proposition and requires a selfless and unbiased instructor. It is far easier and more common that education conditions with the premise that you accept without question the wisdom being served from on high. Again I think of this like the military. When you go in to boot camp the instructor has to assert his dominance. So there is that moment when he has you stand at attention and walks down the line asking if anyone thinks they can take him. Sure you may be younger and stronger but there is one important thing on his side. He makes this challenge when you are all naked. Who wants to fight with everything hanging out with bullseyes on it? Battles don’t go to the strong or the smart all the time. Most of the time they go do the confident and prepared… even in the case where that means a poor argument wins.

Today we have a president with an administration that has only something like 8% of them who have ever worked in the public sector. Most are from the ivory towers of education. Ironically today we are even finding that while I may score better on an IQ test than others that much of that has to do with my familiarity with information in our society and lower scores may not be accurate for some. However I remember hearing that A students teach and B students end up working for C students. Seems like the king of the prom was a football star and always ends up working in a car parts store. I’m not making fun of athletes. I’m saying that climbing to the top of any heap in your youth may be no indication of your future success.

Getting back to the ruling class though, polls show that these people are diametrically opposed to the views of most Americans. Does that mean most Americans are stupid. That depends on where you come down on things like more deficit spending. If you think spending a lot more is what we need to do you are with the ivory tower eggheads. If you think government is out of control and continuing to spend twice what you take in every year, while placing as high or higher burden as we ever have on people to pay it, is insane then you clearly are an uneducated dunderhead… By which I mean someone in touch with the reality of things.

I could go on but I will leave it at this. Dig in to what the ivory tower types believe. In a nut shell they believe they know better than us, we have too much freedom, we get too much information they don’t have control over… Pretty much what you’d expect from a bunch of fascists, socialists, utopians and busybodies. The thing is if you read history that is not what America is about. Our founders were educated men, but due to limitations of the day much of what they learned was self taught. Ironically I am self taught in a lot of things… business, software programming, history, economics.

There is a nobility in education that is driven by the passion and hunger of the student with the end to seek truth and once found to test, verify and confirm in fact it is truth and not some idiotic ideology some arrogant ass is trying to ram down our throats while we pretend to be smart in indoctrination rooms. I’m not against formal education. I am against anyone who believes what I know to be untrue. Any education untested with application and results isn’t worth the gunpowder to blow it to hell and I give a damn if you think you are smart because of a piece of paper. Benefits derive to men through the creation of wealth in a capitalist society. Those people who don’t like it are free to complain, but disproving it to one who confidently understands it is going to be a bloody failure.

Don’t believe people when they say they are smarter than you. Remember the childhood story of the emperor’s new suit which was in fact going naked. Look ‘em in the eye and snarl “The emperor has no clothes”. Their ivory tower eggheads are empty suits. The world has no shortage of ideas and theories… Finding the ones that prove themselves to work and understand why they do or don’t is far more valuable than regurgitating absurdities and treating people like they are too stupid to understand. Kneecap their arguments with a smile and ask them why they believe anything as stupid as the things they clearly do.

Recently I saw SC Dem officials are considering overturnimg Alvin Greene’s primary victory. How sad. It would be in poor taste to make a comparison to our president just because he’s black. Let’s consider the differences instead.

Greene got 59% of the Democrat vote without campaigning. He had no fund raisers or annoying political ads. He rarely uses more than one or tow words to answer a question. Obama broke records fund raising and clearly likes campaigning so much he hasn’t even stopped to hovern yet. He even campaigns for bills that are already law. Talk about loquacious, he mot only crushed every other president at sheer volume of speeches, he even noticed himself when he took 15 minutes to answer a question about raising taxes. Wait a second. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Just because he spent 15 minutes on it I don’t mean to imply he answered it.

When you look beyond the gulf mess to for instance how poorly Iran is being handled you wonder about that “smart power”. Greene dispenses with such illusions neatly. Once you see him in a debate any respectable yellow dog Democrat will know this is the proverbial yellow dog, hold their nose and pull the lever. We can call the president an idiot with impugnity… until someone yells racist.

It gets me thinking about how Obama came to
power. It all started in Iowa when the inevitable baggage of each crony left delegates looking for an out. Many threw their vote to a guy they knew least about, no doubt hoping when they fund out more he would turn out different from every other yellow dog there. Obama’s first primary victory came from people casting their hope on an unknown becsuse all the known candidates were too unsavory. Hey, that sounds a lot like Alvin Greene.

Wake up America! This is what happens when Democrats go to the polls. They confuse a political election with a popularty contest like American Idol. Popularity contests are mindless drivel, which is why so many American Idol fans were confused when they thought it was a talent contest. No wonder our founding fathers chose a republic instead of a democracy. Idol of course is a slickly packaged affair to enable a British man to make obscene money for offending whiney no talents, which always pissed me off. Who can I offend for some of that cash? Greene of course is the unvarnished truth. He won’t be playing golf, flying the world and hobnobbing with stars. He’ll just be glad to have a job and not live in the basement.

In fairness to Greene he’s not the first in congress to wonder about. Clyburn seems off his rocker to me. How about Hank Johnson I think it was who was afraid if too many people went to one side of Okinawa it might capsize.

Let’s be candid, there are too many yellow dogs in congress and now in the white house. I don’t think it’s a question if Alvin Greene is electable if enough Democrats turn out. Especially in NY where judges give some 6 votes… jut to be fair. I think Alvin Greene is less of an anomaly and more an illustration of where the old joke that if a yellow dog were on the ballot as a Democrat that’s who you vote for. There are committee heads who haven’t seen the real world since I left home in 1975. They think we owe them for trashing the country. If Greene had a chnce of being elected he would be welcomed by those dogs. As it is Jim DeMint will win. I don’t think we would be served overturning an election just because the winner doesn’t look so good once we find out about him. Otherwise why stop witH Alvin Greene.

At the Portland Saturday Market somebody came in my booth today and asked me if I would consider putting the weight of the catnip jerked chicken in grams as well as ounces. I come to the market to sell product. It’s part of how I do this thing called paying my bills, so the intensity of his request was rubbing me the wrong way. It didn’t help that he was wearing an Obama Jacket, which has fallen to almost nobody lately willing to advertise their support even in the market. Having spent the last 9 months agonizing on whether I could proceed with my planned expansion and finally deciding the economic uncertainty caused by the political upheaval makes it too risky, this was really rubbing salt in my wounds. Then he proceeded to tell me that there were only three other countries in the world who hadn’t gone metric. This caused me to come unglued as he listed them.

At the moment I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I remember being told that we were the only western nation without nationalized health care, etc… and I was thinking how much I really don’t want to be like anybody else. I never wanted to be like anybody else. I always liked being me. I always liked being American. And so I told him I didn’t care. I told him I didn’t want to be like Europe. I have friends in Europe. I love Europe, but my friends think I’m a crazy American. What was it I didn’t want to do he asked. I told him it was the soft socialism, the governments going bankrupt like Greece, all of it. I told him I like the way we do things here.

That’s when it got interesting, because I realized it was not like me to unload and I was trying to soften it, but then we both talked about our travel around the world and how America was by far the best place to live. I did mention Belgian beer. Anyway it was funny because now instead of talking how America was in the same league as some backwater nations we were agreeing that it was the best place to live. I told him next time I worked on the packaging I would probably dual label. He bought a toy for his cat. He had a nice family.

At the end of the day I was thinking about it and wondering why it set me off. Then it hit me. This was a message from childhood. I remember telling my parents that I wanted such and such a toy and my justification was everybody else is getting it to which my parents said if everybody else was jumping off a bridge would you follow them? Yeah, did your parents ever say that to you? I remember reading about an oil company spending $10M on nuclear research and when asked why the board of directors said because a competitor spent $5M. It turned out to all be wasted money. I actually became so individualistic and have seen so much stupidity that for me the idea that everybody is doing it is my reason to do a double take. Seemed like everybody was buying iPods and then spending lots of money on music. I bought an Archos and people always said wow, bigger screen, expandable, etc…

So this is the thing now. Mob sucker peer pressure. It doesn’t matter if an idea is good or bad, or if you managed to sucker enough Germans to vote for Hitler, it’s all about how many people are doing it and if everybody else is doing it we don’t want to be left out. We’re insecure unoriginal followers needing direction. We’re America. I remember my European friends having a hard time doing a bank transfer to reimburse travel expenses because I didn’t have the “universal” bank transfer number. I had to look it up and finally replied back that the reason my bank didn’t have a number is that American banks started the transfer number system over 50 years before Eurpoean banks and while many other banks around the world had adopted the European bank number system it was silly for the US to scrap theirs.

When has America ever followed? We beat the British not just in our revolution but again in the war of 1812 where we would have been put under British ownership had we lost. We should have lost both by all rights, but we didn’t. Every country in the world has emulated our system of economics to some degree… well except for Cuba but as Castro is now one of the richest men in the world while his people suffer I suspect he doesn’t care that everyone else has a more humane more capitalist government.

There are two disturbing things I heard today. A vendor near us has a small flag in his booth and someone asked him if that meant he was a conservative. He replied that he has the flag there because he is American. This is troubling. Did the questioner think only conservatives would have a flag or did they think it was strange to have one so he must be one of them? Maybe he thought it was like the Christian fish symbol, a secret sign for an underground belief system. The other thing was in a speech today by representative Mike Pence who said that he had heard confidentially that within the administration that they saw themselves as managing the decline of America. This is distressing because I believe that many believe America is largely over, that Obama is the first post-American president. Pence followed with saying that if we get government out of the way America will come roaring back.

This really completes my thought on America being a nation needing the consensus of the rest of the world. Horse crap! We are the richest most powerful nation on earth and that is because in the modern world we are the first nation founded on an idea… the idea of liberty. The American idea is that you can pursue happiness, that you can endeavor to follow your dreams and realize wealth previously only possible through being born into the right family. Being so much bigger than life to the rest of the world is certain to provoke jealousy. If you have led the world why should you start following it? If you have been the innovator why should you start adopting other ideas? If everybody else is less successful, less secure and less happy should we be like them instead?

At least when I was a child it was only some toy company looking for my money. Toys come and go, but governments stick around sucking money out of the economy until they die a bloated failure like Rome or get overthrown. Thankfully we can have a revolution by voting. Most importantly… It doesn’t matter who is doing what. You do what you know is right and what you believe in. Let everybody else jump off a bridge.

Yesterday at a family get together my brother in law said to me we needed to have term limits and a balanced budget amendment for the federal government. My response was that doesn’t go nearly far enough. I listed three things, but now that I think about it I think there are several key problem areas with our federal government. The first one is that they have no regard for the constitution. This is compounded by the fact that we have been willing to codify the misinterpretation of the commerce clause when it suits our needs and the absurd idea that the constitution is a living document. It is clear the founding fathers had a healthy distrust of big government and the tyranny of the majority. Term limits may be useful but it overlooks the root cause of corruption and special interest, tax revenue and regulation.

At the heart of the present debate I believe are a minority of the country who actually believe in what many refer to as the nanny state. I believe for most this is a sincere conviction that a civilized society must protect the less fortunate and the defacto agent of this protection is government. It is an easy emotional position, and I believe it is utterly deluded. I believe a very tiny core of this group has been infected with the worst ideas of Marx, Malthus and others and I believe the curse of intention has blinded them. There is an old saying the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is the adage of unintended consequences. Human nature is to self test our intentions rather than to review our results. For instance if I intend to make more money and decide raising prices is the way, then as sales drop I keep raising prices I can confirm I am okay because I have good intentions and I’m even acting on them. When disaster ensues I may be forced to re-examine my actions, but in many cases people don’t learn. Case in point, taxes. Economies go up and down and governments tend to plan on them staying up. When they go down the answer is to raise taxes. Followed to the logical end eventually this would lead to taxes absorbing all income. Consequences must always be considered.

Let’s look at the problems. The modern idea of the constitution is that it’s an evolving document. That somehow advances in technology have changed our world or made us smarter and now we can find new ways to interpret it. Let’s test that. The constitution is the basis of all law in this country and all law must conform to constitutional directives. Would we consider a law regarding homocide to be evolving and consider that perhaps it meant something different if it was inconvenient when we wanted to kill someone? Of course not. Try talking on officer of the law out of giving you a traffic ticket because you believe you have a new interpretation of the law giving you special dispensation. There are 14 enumerated powers given to congress and a guarantee of states rights in the 10th amendment. Our constitution was the second attempt at forming a government. The first, a lose confederation of states, failed. The commerce clause was written in response to states charging tarriffs for goods crossing state lines making things much more expensive. It was intended that the federal government would have control here to protect the people. Here is the commerce clause which is listed under congressional powers.

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes

This has been expanded by inference to the point that the supreme court ruled that a pig farmer growing wheat in his back yard to feed his pigs affected interstate commerce. It was also used to say it was illegal to grow marijuana for personal use. Did you think this constitutes regulating black markets or merely relegating them. I’m not arguing for legalizing marijuana, I’m saying from a strict constitutional perspective this ruling is as absurd as Dredd Scott and if you are not selling what you grow in your back yard across state lines than it’s the purview of your state, not the federal government.

In 1916 Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president with the slogan “He’ll keep us out of war” and promptly put us into WW I. Wilson has many distinctions including segregating the military, instituting the Federal Reserve Bank, canceling free speech with the Sedition Act, paved the way for Hitler with the Treaty of Versailles and gave us the income tax which initially was only supposed to be no more than 7% and quickly jumped to a top marginal rate of 90%. Over the years it has grown to over 5.5 million words and in 2006 was estimated to be 44,000 pages. Even members of the treasury and IRS use accountants and attorneys from the $4,000,000,000 a year tax preparation industry. A study of the constitutional design of government is a study in balance of power and constraint. Where might any example of this thinking be found in US tax code?

Along with taxes is regulation and the Knowledge Problem. In a nut shell economies are far to complex for any central authority to understand in real time. If there is anything the free market has taught us it is that the organic interaction of the marketplace and supply and demand is inherently self directing and smarter than any central authority. The problem is that many people are frightened by free markets. Paradoxically though we are also confused by them. For instance a recent review from a conservative think tank demonstrated that the recent health care bill was actually only a marginal increase in government control of health care because it is so heavily regulated already. Again, economist Friedrich Hayek explained the problems with command economies. Unfortunately our government responds to a problem with the idea that we need more intent when in fact it was the result of acting on that intent that was creating problems.

One other point is that congress and the president are not required to live under the laws that they pass. I believe not only should they be required to be subject to law but that any practice that is illegal in the private sector needs to be likewise illegal in the public sector and anyone perpetrating criminal acts ought to be criminally liable. I believe that if it were possible to be prosecuted criminally for voting to enact law that was expressly illegal we would go a long way to Jefferson’s vision.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty

A final point my brother in law made was that some regulation was required in the stock market. Specifically short selling and derivatives. I agree. George Soros has become rich producing misery. In the case of the British Pound, the Euro and our housing market he has been betting on them getting worse and also working to effect devaluation. It’s like going to a horse race, picking a loser and drugging them and getting a big payoff. Likewise derivatives are insane as almost nobody understands them. Just look at the debt clock and you will see we owe over $600 trillion. Our GDP is maybe $14 trillion and our total wealth in money land and property as a nation is just over $50 trillion. Derivatives are gambling on currency variations. When money is no longer chiefly made or lost in the production of goods and services or the financial support of said production but in the manipulation and speculation of markets then free markets have been poisoned.

So what are the solutions? I believe what is required is very difficult. Like our founding fathers I believe in institutional distrust. I believe this means constitutional amendments. I know these are not easy, but I also know there is no other way to insure our freedom. These are my proposed amendments.

Clarify Commerce Congressional powers regarding commerce within the states shall be interpreted to be explicit to interstate commerce and without inference. Simply put this would most likely cause a flood of lawsuits to repeal excessive regulation. My thinking, a little chaos can be a good thing. We have 50 states. If one of them wants to become the new workers paradise, by which I mean a socialist nightmare, then we can vote with our feet.

Tax Reform There are several tax reforms proposed worth looking at. A flat tax is good and repealing income tax for a consumption tax, also known as the fair tax, is good. The point should be simple. By eliminating complexity and instituting a tax code that treats everyone equally we eliminate much of the incentive for special interests and the harm they do to the rest of us. Aside from a simple and constrained tax code anyone can understand and read in a few minutes it needs to have built in restrictions capping the tax rate so that raising taxes would require a constitutional amendment.

Government Accountability Act All members of congress and the president as well as any legislative staff shall be subject to all laws governing the public without exception. Any action by congress regarding public monies for public welfare shall be constrained by the same laws and accountability of the same actions by those in the private sector. This may need some work to prevent too much chaos but the intent is to make congress liable for fraud and theft, such has been done with social security and to make them live under the same laws such as they tried to get out of for health care reform. Of course these specifics would become non sequiturs in full reform.

Entitlement Reform The federal government shall devise a plan to insure that those people dependent on entitlement monies from the government are not unduly harmed while setting a firm date to move any such entitlements to private sector solutions. This may not be needed Representative Paul Ryan has a brilliant roadmap for America to make entitlements solvent and pay off the public debt that the CBO says will work. However we do need to be clear about something. The government cannot be trusted. Technically the commerce clause clarification would make entitlements go away but protection must be assured for the elderly who have counted on it. The irony is that if we were all investing in our retirement in the private sector there would be so much investment capital and so much lower taxes and less debt our economy would be the envy of the world.

Public Sector Employment Accountability Act Public sector employees shall not be allowed collective bargaining Take a look at what is bankrupting cities, states and to a degree the federal government. Teachers can’t be fired and public employees can retire after 30 years with 90% pay and great benefits. In many cases these six figure salaries are being paid by people making a lot less. End it!

Prohibition of Unfunded Mandates The federal government shall not mandate state governments take any action that requires any state funds to participate in a federal program. Simple. Get rid of that lever.

Regulatory Protection Act Any federal safety regulation which can be shown to unduly favor one business over another or increases the barrier of entry to competition shall be deemed unlawful, especially in such case as influence in the legislation was exerted by a particular business. Exception to be granted only in the case where incontrovertible and extreme public safety can be proven to be at stake. This gets rid of laws like the toy testing law. You can be arrested for selling a used crib or childrens clothing at a garage sale because it has not passed tests. This enables large manufacturers to put smaller companies out of business without any demonstrable issue of safety. This would also keep the FDA from making vitamins a prescription item and other insanity.

The Patent Reform Act No patent shall be granted unless applicant can demonstrate that the product is not worth developing without patent protection. Any patent demonstrated to be in use freely with the knowledge of the patent holder may be invalidated if it is proved the willfully allowed this. Patents may only be awarded for tangible products and will not be recognized for software or business practices. This is my pet peeve. Companies hold patent portfolios in a cold war as everybody is in violation. Other companies wait until their idea is in wide use to begin collecting. People have become billionaires not making anything except filing patents based on ideas they got from magazines and suing inventors decades later. The entire pharmaceutical industry is based on acquiring patents, however I’d add that the FDA just makes things worse by making it nearly impossible to get anything through. My point is that most products that have a patent would be developed anyway in today’s market and no inventor can afford to engage in a legal patent war so the entire thing has turned into a big legal expense nightmare that hurts innovation and markets instead of advancing them.

Of course term limits and outlawing derivatives and short selling are worth considering. However the ideas I put forward here would effectively deconstruct 100 years of failed policies holding back our freedom and economy. You may or may not agree but there are several incontrovertible facts. First off even the president’s own budget people say our budget path is unsustainable. Second, we have the largest economy in the world because of the freedom we have had. Granted it is a lot less free than it used to be and it’s also not as healthy as it was, but when we look to Europe for a model we are looking at people who adopted some of what made us great and a lot of what didn’t and there is a reason our economy is still greater. The result of the ideas I have put forward here would be tumultuous and perhaps frightening. It would result in our courts overturning a lot of law. I saw fine. It is walking away from the beautiful simplicity of freedom for the delusion of collectivism that has taken away more greatness than we can know. Let’s fix it!

Remember the president repeating over and over that the time for debate was over? Remember Al Gore saying the science was settled? Remember the astroturf coffee party claiming we needed more civil discourse? Been called a teabagger? Today I was set off by a statement that extremists were spreading ignorance. Here’s what really bugged me. It was said by someone I really like, admire and probably disagree a fair amount with. He had a link to someone deriding “teabaggers”. Look it up

Many people use the acrostic “Taxed Enough Already” for tea. In 1773 patriots in Boston harbor threw English tea overboard rather than pay the 1% tax of the stamp act. To be clear it was not the amount of tax or the tax it’s self. It was what it represented, that goods had to go past the colonies to England to be stamped and taxed, then back to the colonies. Moreover it was the feeling that King George III and English aristocracy looked down on colonists, saw them as merely a source of revenue and interfered in their affairs with intrusive governance. The Democrats and Obama have rung up $2,000,000,000,000 in debt in a mere 421 days. Whether or not our income taxes have been hiked is a pointless discussion with the Bush tax cuts sunsetting and economic policies devaluing the dollar. Like the hotel said to the rock band after the party, somebody has to pay for this. Given that government seems not to be listening I think the tea party idea is very germane to our cultural history.

Being in my 50s I want to say something to younger people. In years past it was not uncommon for people to have friends who had very different ideas and to argue those ideas without imparing that friendship. Today people are surprised when people of different ideologies hook up or that people like Sean Hannity and Bob Beckel can be friends. I’m here to say it used to be much more common. Today we like to ally ourselves with people who will support our fragile world view, suck our thumb and complain about discord. Okay, not everyone. There is a pattern though and Al Gore helps explain it.

When I first heard Gore prattle on about my breath killing the planet I felt a little odd to have arrived at the party so late as to have missed the debate portion and be stuck with the sermon. Of course there is a reason for that. I remember reading some years back of true believers in global warming staging a debate with those horrible holocaust deniers who wanted to drench baby ducks in oil. The funny thing is that the debate became so one sided in favor of those opposing the warmists that it turned into a minor disaster. Pretty much everyone agreed those opposed to global warming won, but worse yet a portion who came there were persuaded to switch sides to no longer believe in global warming. I want to be very clear here. First and foremost among reasons not to debate is the certainty that your side doesn’t have the goods and will be beaten mercilessly in an exchange.

This brings us to question the whole purpose of debate. Are you a truth seeker in science or philosophy or are you an ideologue? An ideologue enters into battle with the purpose only to defend their premise. Clearly not mounting a defense is preferable to risking a loss. Conversely one seeking truth will want to observe or participate in an exchange without regard for which side they find they fall on. Truth will out on the battlefield of debate. If however you have sought truth and believe your argument rests upon it then you will be eager to test your mettle and prove your assertions.

All of this leads to simple conclusions. Debate is never over and is always good. Anyone who has played in a band knows the power of fusing ideas. Anyone who has ever had to solve problems on a team or trust their life to a partner in a dangerous situation knows the old axiom that two heads are better than one. Our great country debated whether to oppose England, how to proceed and how to form a government. In fact our current government was the second try as the first quickly failed. Nothing could be more American than spirited debate.

One thing I believe with all my heart is that in the end we must love our brother. We must not allow the molten anger of our cause to sear through the bonds of our brotherhood. I say this in the most difficult time of all for me to say it, for I believe that never before has our nation faced a greater threat… and that threat is from within. I believe we have been infected with the ideas of Marx and Alinsky. I believe the only thing that can bond the fabric of our society is our constitution and I believe in it’s traditional and original meaning and intent. I believe the modern interpretation of our constitution has become a cancer determined to unleash an all powerful government and I believe that well meaning people I care about may believe things that I do not.

It is not an easy thing, to see the hubris and vitriol directed at people who, like me, value the traditional interpretation of history. It would be perhaps easy to accept a third of the country believing in the supremacy of government in our lives if it were not that minority that had achieved power over most Americans I believe, as polls indicate, think government has become dangerously powerful. However I personally think such disagreements ought to be ones we can amicably have between good friends. I see a simple solution. I believe very few people truly lead in the ideology of power that is all consuming government. I believe most supporters simply have come to accept the argument.

The greatest irony is that the argument is always about being compassionate. It is the exception to the rule that seeks to become the rule. Our society serves most of us very well. First we find someone who may prove the exception to the rule. In fact as news items show this person may in fact prove that our compassionate society does work. It doesn’t matter. What matters is conjuring the fiction and asking if you are heartless or will you grant the power to rectify things. Then we set about remaking society as a whole to fix the exception, however fictional. It’s brilliant because it requires no real thought to accept, just emotion. In fact if you apply critical thought and begin asking questions… why the whole thing just falls apart!

This is why the ideologues who wish to remake America into something else wish to avoid any debate. Ideologues are not rational. Their concepts serve as their own proof and their disproof serves as a call for more of their concepts. However I believe that among those mesmerized in the persuasive arguments of the ideologues the vast majority could be liberated by debate. Perhaps I am overly optimistic. I just don’t see my fellow American as my enemy, even if they are championing a course I believe is destructive to our nation. In the end I believe something else…

I believe in the nature of our nation. I used to be one of the people who would might have called someone a teabagger had I grown up in a different time. However the more I was exposed to people, history and those who touched my life the more I began to see something amazing. The more I saw the greatness of America the more I sought to know it. I believe the founding concepts of our nation are so compelling and self affirming it is not possible for most to resist them. Personal freedom inherent in the nature of who we are as opposed to a gift from a central authority… Intoxicating to anyone seeking more out of life than to live in their parents basement. Freedom is so seductive it lead to nearly every nation on earth choosing to self govern and have free markets where before men lived under the tyranny of kings.

Let the debate begin. Let those people you meet see the nobility and decency that has made this the greatest nation ever. Don’t apologize for our success and wealth but extol it. This nation has become great through freedom and open acceptance of different ideas. We have always been shaped in debate We will not remain great if we choose acrimonious condescension over civil debate. Today we need the best ideas and thinking, not the most dogmatic ideologies. Debate is the door to the liberation of ideas which can survive the gauntlet that only debate can offer.

It is often said that people rarely see the importance of a moment in history as they are living it. Looking back in retrospect things always seem more clear. Of course some things are undoubtably more cloudy but the value of central moments and actions become obvious. Certainly the greater the stroke of history the grander we expect the result, yet I believe much of the best of history proved to be of significant benefit precisely because of how insignificant it may have seemed at the time. If in fact people rarely recognize history being made then how much history would there be if it was by definition only in the grand stroke? Truly the most amazing history I have learned have been the small parts played by insignificant people that ended up turning everything. Yet it is the grand strokes we lionize as history’s great moments.

When I was learning to program software there was a programmer who had done some amazing things that transformed much of KDE, the open source project I have been involved with. I never imagined I could ever stand next to such a code wizard. Then I read that this individual liked to write a little bit of code, compile it and see how it worked and then continue on. It was a revelation. He took an incremental approach and with it did great things. I remember thinking “I can do that!” As I began programming I grew more and more confident until one day I took on a challenge on a level I had never done before. It required rewriting hundreds of lines of code across a number of files before I could test it. Even though I was taking an incremental approach it was a big bite. I spent a lot of time not evaluating how it worked, but trying to figure out why it failed and brought the whole program down.

There are a few simple rules I find in life that apply everywhere. To paraphrase the great Japanese swordsman Myamoto Musashi, once a man understands the way of wisdom he can accomplish things that he would have previously failed at. Musashi also said such understanding typically comes around age 50. I cursed when I read this in my 30s. Now I believe 50 is a better minimum age for a president, not that it is any assurance of wisdom. What is the wisdom of which I speak? Simple. Probabilities. We spend our lives believing we can defeat the odds because we are smarter and better looking and all the while prove the rule. This hubris leads us to absurd thinking that we can succeed where all others have failed and worst of all to the idea that we can rule by exception.

You can spot those who lack wisdom. They complain about the nature of circumstance or battle it head on instead of reasoning to find a position and approach that will enable circumstance to gratify their desires. For example these people gamble the last of their money away hoping to win while wise people open a casino and make money. In my opinion the rule by exception is the most evil of all. Say for instance we wanted to change something that generally works. We find an exception where people feel a knee jerk emotional support for our exception and then we bring them on board to destroy the working system to support the exception. This is called the slippery slope. For instance who could argue against keeping women from being butchered in back allies getting illegal abortions? Likewise who would argue for 3rd trimester partial birth abortion as contraception? Certainly it is hard in principle to look dispassionately at specifics. However for an argument like legalizing marijuana I think that just because it has medical uses doesn’t mean it should be generally available. It’s an exception. Besides I find the libertarian argument of a failed prohibition, tax act and absurd classification with heroin much more compelling.

Likewise the argument for the passage of what has been called health care reform has a significant failure in claiming to fix something for a small percentage of the population that will impact 100%. One could make the case on this alone, but it would be missing the the fact of how this will be seen by history. That cannot be said today as history is yet to be written. America does seem easily seduced by entitlements, but then who doesn’t like free stuff. However we can ask how we expect it to fare with regard to probability. We could dissect the nature of the bill, but wisdom tells us we can avoid the emotional battleground of specifics. Sheer probability tells us the more action we take the more likelihood of errors and unintended consequences. The more complex and involved the equation the more chance of interactions that feedback and produce a domino effect. To put it in programming terms, the more chance we have of finding there is a broken system, and this is key… The more points of failure introduced into a system the more challenging it is to find the key failure. In fact if there are enough points of failure introduced it becomes possible to encounter multiple failure points, which makes debugging and testing exceedingly difficult.

I’m sure in the coming years there will be no end to arguments over specific details of the absurdly complex law congress passed today that will affect the taxes and quality of life of every American. We could note that never in the history of the country has so sweeping a change been voted on, let alone by only one party and let alone attempting legislative chicanery to fix it’s manifold problems. All of this is really going to be of little consequence in less time than most people imagine. There is a simple reason why. I ask you to think of the ones you love in the world as you consider my next words…

When someone makes a promise to you it is essential you consider their words. Our parents benefit in our youth for most of us as being somehow infallible. Yet few are so fortunate to hold such an image through their entire life for few of us manage such sterling character. We often fail our loved ones, but sometimes our failures have absolutely nothing to do with us, but reflect circumstances beyond our control. When receiving a promise we must consider the promise, who is making it, their history and last of all the circumstances surrounding the promise.

How many promises in your life have died the excruciating death of the fiscal impossibility to complete or preserve that promise? Has anyone ever let you down? Have you or anyone close to you ever failed? We imagine that while we fail some things our family unit may fare better but when bound together as a nation we simply cannot be stopped. While there is an element of truth to this in the economy of scale in the end it comes down to the collective will and ability of every single American to do as we promise each other. Here is where we must never forget the most important thing… As long as every American is as important as every other, as deserving as every other and as protected as every other then we stand together. As soon as we become divided into groups, punish some and reward others… as soon as we become a nation divided… we are headed for a fall.

This is the point we must not miss today. When I was young I was taught that my right to swing my arm went as far as your nose. Once my exercise of my rights intruded on your rights I was no longer exercising mine but violating yours. I love that explanation. I also know that any promise I commit to do for anyone is limited by my ability to do it. As a business owner my ability is limited not only by many factors in my work but in the trust I have with people I have credit with or lease property with. Should I fail to meet my obligations financially I could fail to meet my commitments to my customers, loved ones, etc…

I watched some of the debate this weekend. Representative Paul Ryan really drove home a point to house members in his committee. I can’t find that video, but here he is explaining his plan for medicare. Please look and consider. Currently in order to pay off our debt without reform your household needs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many thought half a trillion dollar deficits under Bush were insane, but under Obama they are already $1.5 trillion. In 10 years our annual interest will be $1 trillion. Of course that assumes we don’t lose our AAA bond rating which would make borrowing twice as costly and without substantial change force bankruptcy in a few short years. Please note from today’s news Warren buffet is a better risk than the US and our AA rating is at risk These warnings come regularly.

The argument that this health care bill saves money ignores the reality that the congressional budget office is required to operate based on the assumptions. Again Paul Ryan in a short clip. According to polls most Americans don’t believe that costs will not exceed what they are being told. Don’t believe that? Look into costs in Massachusetts and Tennessee.

If you are celebrating the passage of this bill odds are you are young and, forgive me for saying, clueless, or an old hippie who wishes this were real socialism. It is authoritarian but not full blown socialism yet. The unintended consequences will be many, but they will include more taxes, followed by more taxes. More taxes will siphon money from the private sector to the public sector. Think of the public sector like one of those little fish that eat bad things off bigger fish and think of that little fish getting so big it’s starts eating the food of the big fish too. Only the private sector creates wealth and without private wealth you have a public system that equally distributes poverty.

The words for this day are indeed unintended consequences. Among those are the potential for the financial collapse of our government and severe social turmoil, and it could happen sooner than you imagine. I’ll put it this way. If our elected officials don’t see the writing on the wall now what do you suppose will make it clear to them short of Armageddon? And this is perhaps the one bit of good news…

Americans are an incredibly resourceful people of strong character. We seem to know inherently what is right and what is wrong. We may make a foolish mistake, like occasionally electing utterly clueless morons, but we are not stupid. We value liberty and freedom more than any other nation. We value character and ethics above any other culture. We value opportunity more than any other people. We may allow ourselves to be distracted by the comforts of life, but when faced with a challenge we wake up and come together.

If you are like me wondering how we have fallen so far from equal opportunity and equal treatment to an un-American pursuit of equal outcomes you are not alone. America must reform entitlements to survive and must reform government to thrive. Now we have a new urgency in the ticking time bomb of a new entitlement at a time we ought to be thinking about solving problems instead of creating huge experiments with dire probabilities. Just as the Texans shouted “Remember the Alamo” we can run to battle at the polls shouting “Remember the health care debacle”. Don’t expect it to be easy. Our opposition is sticking flowers in gun barrels and chanting for utopia. I may be getting acupuncture and using Chinese herbs, but I will be fighting to preserve the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and especially domestic. You can be sure there are more people looking to shrink government than ever before. If you have been in the delusion of utopia you are welcome to join the those of us patriots who only wish for you and your children to have every opportunity we have.

Never forget the blow to liberty today. Remember the health care debacle!