Archive for March, 2010

Too Much Economic Static

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

Today I celebrate a birthday and I’m almost old enough to throw my hands up and say everyone else can worry about their messes. To my friends who are celebrating a glorious victory for our exalted leader, I love you. Enjoy the moment, much as a young man would after marrying a woman he hardly knows. As my grandfather used to say, marry in haste, repent in leisure. She may seem beautiful the day after, but give it a few years and you might be trying to slit your wrists with a rusty tin can lid. If you don’t believe me that our elected representatives haven’t read the bill just search youtube for Jason Matera who has interviewed a number of congressmen and asked them about specific paragraphs in the bill like rehabilitation for sex offenders. There have also been admissions of this being socialism and our president, while mocking the opposition, said it was a step toward universal health care. You might like the idea but I don’t see why I should be forced to do what you want and I certainly think our president should be our president, not your president mocking me. I wouldn’t mock you. Mocking presidents is a long tradition made easier when they demean the office.

Right after this bill was signed we found that the pre-existing conditions for children is not an immediate benefit even though the president repeatedly said it was. Oops. I guess they didn’t read that. This last week we found out that various companies are going to be out some money because of the bill. Mark Steyn does a nice piece which leaves me feeling ill and wishing he were not so damned smart and perceptive. The key factor here is a footnote adjusting a tax incentive to help companies cover retirees for prescriptions. It costs us $665 per person and they decided to bump it up to the 35% corporate tax rate. Hell Sweden only has 26.3%. Sweden! If these companies dump these people into medicare the cost per person for us jumps to $1,200. AT&T estimates it will cost them $1 billion but the total first-quarter hit to S&P 500 firms will be $4.5 billion according to the Wall Street Journal. Companies are considering what to do. One company that produces medical equipment is looking at laying off as many as 1,000 people. In case you don’t know, companies aren’t really designed to absorb all new costs. They either minimize them or pass them on to us.

This is where I point out a big problem with the congressional budget office when they scored this bill for cost. You see they do what congress asks them and they use something called static scoring. What’s that you ask? Well it assumes that no matter what you do tax wise it will have no effect. For instance let’s say you asked them to tell you how much money you would get raising the top marginal tax rate 25% on everyone making $1 million a year. That’s $250,000 more in revenue per person, right? Suppose at $1.5 million a year you are at 75% but at $800,000 a year you are at 50% Nearly doubling your income nets you $375,000 instead of $400,000 for a loss of $25,000. The argument for soaking the rich is that they can afford it. Let me ask you a question. If you could make more money producing half as much why would you hire the extra people and bust your ass? This is why the Laffer curve explains optimal tax revenues are obtained well below the soak the rich level.

And here is where out problem gets ugly, because if companies want to save that $4.5 billion in taxes they dump those people into medicare and that makes over $4 billion in additional costs. That spread is over a $9.5 billion dollar error due to the insane premise of static scoring. So why use it? Well with dynamic scoring you have to make additional judgments and it’s more work with supposedly less certainty. However any rational person understands the truth. If this kind of error is showing up while we’re still in the honeymoon and the CBO needed to multiply their original estimate for medicare by nine times things aren’t so good. Especially when we are in so much debt that by 2018 our interest will be more than we spend on defense, $800 billion. Of course that assumes that somebody will still be loaning us money and that our AAA rating won’t be gone which will more than double that interest payment. By 2020 America will look like a 1971 Oldsmobile pinging, surging and trailing the think white smoke of motor oil leaving everyone watching wondering when it will seize up and stop. It’s already not looking so great.

If you are still drunk on the thrill of making us into a European disaster you might be angry at those companies for crashing your party. After all they can afford to lose money… lay people off, things like that. I can tell you that representatives Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak are upset. So upset in fact they have written to the heads of these companies with an invitation to appear at congressional hearings. That’s never fun, but hey… Here’s what you need to keep in mind. Those companies are required by law to publicly declare such losses when they are aware of them. Yeah, it’s called Sarbanes Oxely and ironically it has made it so expensive and complex to do business that the next year after it was advanced tech companies going public nearly stopped. In fairness it was right after the dot com bubble burst, but it added substantially to the cost of going public. The point is, people are now going to be harassed by congress for adhering to a law congress wrote that makes it more expensive to do business over exposing another law congress wrote makes it more expensive to do business.

For those people who lament we are losing our manufacturing base and jobs are being shipped overseas I submit to you it is not greed causing this. Why the hell would you leave the most educated and talented workforce in the world where you can maintain complete control unless you had to do so for fiscally defensive reasons? So let’s consider the issue of static scoring and ask ourselves the simple question. How many other stupid decisions made by congress are making it more difficult for business. You can say they are all evil and to be honest I’m not overly fond of the big faceless corporation. In fact I’d rather get a root canal without anesthetic than try to fit into the corporate world… But I do understand economics.

Recently we got some growth numbers, but it looks like our projected growth for the remainder of the year is around 3%. Ordinarily that would not be bad, but to realize a 1% drop in unemployment this year we would need 5%. Oops! And in some places over a third of home mortgages are under water. Remember how we got here? So skipping over the debt rant and going to jobs we need to see about 100,000 hires a month to stay even with population growth and we’re still negative. If we were to see a 1% decline it would still leave us between 8% and 9%, closer to 9%. When we sunk $860 billion into a stimulus that Joe Biden keeps telling us is working we were approaching 7% and we were told we wouldn’t go over 8%. The presidents office of management and budget says… no appreciable decline in unemployment for the next 2-3 years. What are we doing?

One of the most amazing things I’ve heard in the last year is our president saying that jobs and the economy are tied to health care. This week we find out he is right. Clearly we can already see more jobs going away, more debt being accrued and more doctors leaving the profession, with something near 80% less excited about medicine. Do you even want to know where they said they would get the rest of the money or how much it would really cost? Remember your household owes something like $400,000 for entitlements right now next to the $60,000 in government debt. If you have children this is where you look at them and hang your head in shame and apologize… then tell them to get a good job and pay your medicare!

The thing that strikes me as most blatant is the hypocrisy of calling in head of companies reporting losses under SOX as they must by law simply because the Democrats in those house committees don’t like what they are saying… that they have to say by law. Gut check. Do those representatives care about the truth and how it affects ordinary Americans, their jobs and our economy… Or are those representatives just throwing a hissy fit over someone exposing the trail of bovine excrement coming from their sacred cows?

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Crooks & Nannies

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Many years ago the girl I was dating told me her friend had just got her MBA. So I asked this new MBA who was going to be a clothing buyer what she would do in her first meeting with a supplier wanting to sell to her. She proceeded into a technical explanation of how she evaluated and I told her no. She shifted to another technical explanation and again I said no. After the third rejection she asked me exasperated what I would do. I said simply I would look the person in the eye, size them up and decide if I could trust them. It’s pretty simple. If you are involved in complex dealings with someone you cannot trust you’re going to get screwed. Not having an MBA I learned this in the school of hard knocks.

Yesterday on Fox Business Network John Stossel did a show on entitlements and generational theft. At several points he was sitting with young children playing with toys and taking them from them saying he needed them. It was an entertaining illustration of generational theft, especially with the looks on the children’s faces. In classic Stossel form he started out showing Bernie Madeoff and talking about social security being a Ponzi scheme. He even had a guest attorney on who helped people with net worth exceeding half a million dollars get medicaid. I have a few points about how bad things are, but my primary point is that we establish trust based on prior history. As such I would say Bernie Madeoff has a better chance of reform than congress.

Of course the first point of all this is that the programs of social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment and such are social welfare. No one can argue against the compassionate reasons for these programs, though it could be argued that like income tax they really should have been done with constitutional amendments as there doesn’t seem to be anything in congress’ enumerated powers to support them. Am I arguing against them? I think it best to remain silent and instead hear from Benjamin Franklin, one of our most respected founders and the man who gave us the post office, the library and the fire department.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

I think that says it nicely. Currently many people are saying that the individual mandate in the health care take over is unconstitutional. I agree, but we have this odd judicial habit of ignoring the constitution if we can show precedence for having violated it previously. As a self employed person I have to pay unemployment insurance on myself. People who do road construction get laid off and collect unemployment during the winter and think nothing of getting their money back. Should I be mandated to insure my employment and should the government be the insurer? Ironically there is also precedent for getting out of government programs. The Amish are exempted from social security. They don’t participate because they are conscientious objectors. You only need to show your personal beliefs are in conflict to get exempted, but you probably need to convince a judge in court. You see if everyone who wanted to exempted themselves from these social welfare programs… well it seems moot because we can’t. However I say there is another problem.

This year social security will need to borrow money from China to pay. That’s nine years ahead of when the president’s OMB (office of management and budget) predicted. Oops! Orzag scores again. He also made a trillion dollar error on the 10 year budget. Hey, that’s only a million million. Here’s the point. When you review government spending you will see 3 of the last 40 years that we spent less than we took in but we also have been taking in surpluses in social security for decades. Where is that surplus money? It is in the form of IOUs from congress in a filing cabinet in the capital that we thought was a lock box. I don’t know the exact number if it is into the trillions but does it matter? Currently there is only one way for congress to cope with the $1.5T deficits and $60T liability in in unfunded mandates… monetize the debt. Know what that means? Simple. Let’s say we owe $100 trillion. We crank up the printing presses and print that $100 trillion to pay it off. Brilliant, right? I mean we could pay it off without even taxing anyone. The problem is that afterward our currency is devalued. Gas could go to $100 a gallon not from scarcity, but from inflation of currency. Monetizing the debt is an attractive solution for congress. They don’t have to raise taxes and they can blame Wall Street bankers. It’s a win win for them as they vote their pay up to several million dollars a year. The big problem is that if congress raises taxes to keep up with spending they end up with tax rates from 25% on the low end to 85% on the high end.

Let’s get back to what congress has done with the money we sent them for social security. Initially when FDR introduced it there was no other way to pay other than direct transfer of wealth from the working young to the old. However not only did this not change into something more like a legitimate legal private sector retirement plan, virtually all excess has been spent. If any private sector business did this their executives in charge would be bunking with Bernie Madeoff. With 435 representatives and 100 senators plus a few presidents signing off on this for over 70 years several things are clear. First we note that as law makers somehow they appear to be exempt from any law sending their asses to jail for what is clearly unethical theft, illegal for anyone else to do. Another thing that is clear is that trusting congress with our money is like asking a heroin addict to watch your house while you go on vacation. Good luck keeping any wealth.

However the really significant aspect of all this goes back to what Ben Franklin said. If people have to take care of themselves they do better. Remember the question if you would take a penny doubled every day for 30 days or a million dollars. Do the math. Only a fool would take the million dollars. Likewise if you were 20 years old and invested $1,000 if you could double it every four years you would have a million dollars from only a thousand when you were 60. Imagine if you put $1,000 a year into investments or even savings before we got to this wacky ultra low interest trying to avert financial disaster. There are two spheres our money can go to, public and private sectors. in the private sector it finances business growth and creates jobs. It creates wealth and raises our standard of living. In the public sector they have no ability to create wealth so all their money is siphoned off the private sector. Therein lies the problem. The more money taken from the productive economy the less it creates and produces.

Let me put this in contrast. If we were taking Ben Franklin’s view then our government would not be risking bankruptcy, our taxes would be lower, more money would be flowing into the private sector, a booming economy would make investments pay handsomely and anyone who had invested a fraction of their entitlement taxes wisely would retire wealthy. Instead we keep giving money to a government who will make our money worthless and impoverish us in order to give us cradle to grave social benefits. Have we really become such a nation of suckers?

Am I against all social welfare programs? Pretty much, but I can’t bring myself to take the tough stand that as a nation we cannot provide some assistance. However statistically unemployment goes up whenever it is extended. It seems counter intuitive people would stay on longer just because they can, but some do. My point is any assistance from the government would need to be means tested, limited and have an expiration. In the end I think charity does that best and even in these difficult economic times we are seeing $300 billion a year going to charity. Imagine if our economy were to explode and out taxes go down.

Now of course we have a new entitlement that is scheduled to have over 100 new agencies, dictatorial control from Washington by the HHS secretary on what we must buy and 16,500 new IRS agents to make sure we are in compliance. When we set up medicare we projected the cost in 1990 and it turned out to only cost nine times as much. In fact the total fraud in the system is close to the projected cost at a whopping 10% or so. Just another reason to distrust a congress who is fiscally answerable to no one and as law makers will never indict themselves for their criminal activities. Congress truly fits the bill as crooks and nannies. Today congressmen and presidents look to get their name on landmark legislation with far more concern to their egotistical vision of their place in history than whether we will have a future or how horrible their legislation is. The best thing we could do as a nation is to observe and reflect Franklin’s thoughts and roll back our welfare state.

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Is it Time for Debate Yet?

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

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.

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A Momentous New Alamo

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

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!

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Defending Those I Distrust

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

On August 31st, 2001 I lost my beloved mother to a pulmonary embolism. It happened as I was driving her from San Diego to Portland in a moving van. She had been largely immobilized when a pin in her ankle that was supposed to be permanent had come out. She got out of the van and stepping down dislodged a blood clot in her ankle which lodged in her lung. She always had a cabinet full of prescriptions and she had seen her doctor the day before. I was surprised to find out that she died of the third leading cause of death in the country. She was such an ideal candidate it was amazing her doctor had not prescribed an anti-coagulant. After all her mother died of a stroke. She always told me to stop wiggling my leg but I found out when I worked on cardiac care equipment that I was just reflexively working my venous pump and I always told people to deal with it.

Mom had other problems, like a misdiagnosis of a broken back after a car accident that left her stuck on the couch for a year. Dad always told me doctors buried their mistakes. I have such an inherent distrust of doctors and pharmaceuticals that when I needed medical attention I went to a naturopath and basically interrogated her. During a discussion about blood pressure I informed her I was very much against ever being catheterized unless it was a last resort as 1% of these procedures lead to accidental ventral tears and death. My doctor was impressed I knew this but the truth is I saw it happen once and I never got over the answer the lab tech gave me… The man would be dead in three days.

I was very fortunate. Several years back I had such high blood pressure I probably would have been dead in a few months from one of several possible fatal conditions. My dentist refused to clean my teeth. My doctor refused to treat me and instead sent me to the emergency room where I arrived so freaked out my blood pressure was something over 240/120. I forget. I was practically in shock. I took a couple of pills and was text book, but as my doctor wanted to find the cause rather than just whack the symptom with drugs I was given a light prescription. The doctor in the ER told me I should not remain on such light drugs without results. I proceeded to go through a year of everything my naturopathic doctor could think of. That included nutrient pushes and drips, allergy treatment, diagnosis of masked depression and targeted amino acid therapy and hormone therapy. Eventually it went to evaluating my personal stress at home. I won’t go into all the detail. I did however discover NAET treatment for allergies which is natural, permanent and insurance companies hate it because it is less profitable than ongoing treatment and drugs.

So my bottom line is I inherently distrust allopathic medicine because of their incestuous relationship with big pharma. I distrust big pharma because they rely on creating drugs with all kinds of side effects based on herbal remedies for the sole purpose of getting a patent which allows them a government granted monopoly. Then of course we have laws to break up monopolies because they are anti competitive. However who I really don’t trust is the government who restricts interstate insurance sales when in fact the constitution gave the federal government powers to prevent states from hampering interstate commerce.

Clearly I am not your poster boy for the status quo in medical care. That said I will qualify all my distrust with the adage power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nobody accrues power like government, thus I trust them least of any solution as a rule. I see my naturopath regularly and will not be seeing an allopathic doctor unless it is a matter of last resort or I have been broken up in an accident and need to be put back together. That said I am totally against what Washington is proposing because it has nothing to do with health care and everything to do with power.

The obvious solution for the current problems is to deregulate insurance companies so that any state that offered better pricing could attract business and competition. Insurance companies enjoy state run monopolies now. Insurance should be untied from employers and 100% portable. So much for pre-existing conditions, which BTW the Democrat idea here is a Trojan horse designed to explode insurance costs and eventually bankrupt insurance companies once they regulate cost. People should be involved in cost. I pay out of pocket and I was spending at most $400 a month to see the doctor, but usually $100 or less before supplements. Several states have restricted frivolous lawsuits and the size of certain awards. Doctors can pay $100,000-$250,000 a year for malpractice insurance and add 20% of their testing and costs in defensive medicine.

While these are common sense things I was impressed with a recent show by John Stossel on this… In fact I would say he is a revelation in sanity everyone should try to argue with. I heard recently most of the cost of pharmaceuticals was actually advertising and promotion. They give doctors a lot of money to push drugs and why are they advertising on TV telling us to ask our doctor if we should have this drug? Excuse me? I go to my doctor and expect she will know if there is a need for me to take a drug and what the hell drug I need. Thankfully she practically apologizes while explaining if she has to prescribe a drug.

Stossel made the case against the FDA. The point is that it costs a fortune to get a drug or procedure approved. He showed promising medical research that didn’t have the last $100,000,000 to get the job done. Am I the only one who thinks that companies today would develop and market products regardless of whether they could get a patent? I think it should require proof that you can’t develop your idea without patent protection to get one. If that were the case, and there were no agency justifying huge costs we would have an entirely different world. Costs would drop, products and research would explode and standards and practices groups would be making information available.

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but one thing I am sure of. Getting answers from the top people in the field makes more sense than from politicians or some faceless corporate entity. I’m thankful I have great health care. I am unhappy I can’t buy a major medical high deductible policy because the feds enable states to be busy bodies. To me it has become simple. Whatever is more oriented to freedom and choice is where I am going to be happiest.

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Your Shiny New Gov’t ID

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Senators Charles Schumer and Lindsay Graham are hard at work with a new plan for a universal biometric government ID card. Oh joy. I read the details they have so far and it brings up a lot of questions. They are talking about reading either finger prints or the veins in the back of your hand and requiring the card to get a job. The estimated price for the equipment is $800. The article I read left a lot more questions than answers. The first thing I note is the $800 price as they said small businesses that don’t have the machine could take a new employee to a post office or somewhere and process them. That’s convenient. Good thing your time doesn’t cost a dime.

The first question I had was why $800? What company is selling their technology to these senators and assuring their lifetime wealth? No doubt they have some strategic patent and government lock in. It is worth noting the biometric readers on laptops cost much less because all you need is a super cheap cell phone camera chip, some glass, plastic and software. Of course there are a lot more questions that arise but central to this are the arguments that the social security card is out dated and we can’t seem to verify citizenship.

First of all how do you obtain this card? I recently had to get a new social security card to get a drivers license. I didn’t even need that for a passport! You need birth certificate and things of this nature to prove your identity. Won’t you need exactly the same thing for this new ID card? Also, what if you lose the card? What kind of validation of payment with the card will the government require from companies? I hate to give these statists ideas but if they microchip the population like we do our pets and will soon do our groceries they could track us everywhere. The point is that this card would be tied to payroll from every company. If you are self employed do you need one to pay yourself?

Most people don’t remember when social security started as it was in the first half of the last century. That means that everyone today paying into social security should have their money there, right? Actually the social security lock box is full of IOUs from the government. If this happened in a business it would be jail time for raiding the pension plan. Originally and by law you are only required to give your social security number to the government for benefits or an employer for taxes. However it became a national ID number used by banks. So while you are not required to give your ID to get a loan you simply won’t get one if you don’t. Even weirder if you are Amish you don’t have to pay social security taxes because they are conscientious objectors. Given that it is in the red, is being operated like a Ponzi scheme and congress has repeatedly robbed it and left worthless IOUs I think it’s clear that only a fool would trust the government with their money any more than Bernie Madoff.

We have been assured this national ID card will not be misused like our social security number. That assurance is only as credible as the unicorn next to you. They plan on storing information on the card. Anyone who is paying attention to the bailouts knows the government is in bed with the big banks. How long until this card is networked in the financial world? How long until you need one of these cards to open a bank account? How long until this card replaces bank cards and the reader is being used for secure online purchases. How long until all currency is moved through your biometric ID card?

Granted that may seem a stretch, but the savings to the government would be huge. I doubt it would be easy to fully convert but the real motivation to fear is the government intrusion. You see if you have to carry this card with you for any reason it is quite easy to include an RFID tag that can be read if you are within 25 feet. That means anyone who has your ID number can now physically track you. Your employer could use this instead of a time clock and talk to you about your bathroom time. A store could target the rotation of marketing displays to audience. Intelligence agencies could track you even more accurately than with cameras. Your government and employer might even be able to review every purchase you make.

Granted you could say this is awfully paranoid, and you’d be right. However as the saying goes, just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me. In the 1990s I met someone who was here on an expired visa from South Africa. This person was causing me grief and it downed on my I could turn him in and have him deported. I called INS and to my surprise they couldn’t be bothered. I could go on and on about borders, jobs and people I know relevant to immigration issues but the bottom line is this. If there is a failure in the government why should every citizen give up their privacy to fix it?

We’re told this card will not be able to be cheated or forged. Whatever. One of the most astonishing news items I read recently was about the theft of thousands of computers and other gear from homeland security. Yeah, think about that. First you have to prove who you are… with paper documents. Then you have to be fingerprinted like a common criminal. Then you have, let me see, something like a voting machine to assure legitimacy. Oops! We know how many scandals have hit there. Finally, after we discount the creative abilities of black hats and the rampant theft of national security equipment we come down to the real consideration…

Border security is not a top priority. Enforcing laws is not a top priority. The fallback position instead is to compromise the privacy of every citizen and add expensive infrastructure and additional hurdles to employers. Why is it that we don’t allow web sites to aggregate specific personal data, only general aggregates without personal connections? Privacy. Why is it that we don’t allow companies to dip into pensions when they are short on cash? Propriety. Why are we so willing to trust a government that has shown that it will exclude it’s own actions from the the same regulation that we would place on any other entity. Of the people… for the people… by the people… or is it of the people, for the elites, by the aristocrats?

When I look at what is happening today I see a disconnect from the quintessential distrust our founders had for powerful central government. I see power corrupting and a central government that wants to control more and more of our lives. I would consider that to enact the most oppressive control government would need the most advanced means of monitoring and gathering data. I really don’t care how rational this proposition sounds. I have two words for you… Unintended consequences. If this were a credit card I could choose to consent. As a government plan who imagines it would be rolled back?

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Clarion Call - Lead Don’t Leach

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

Reflecting on my life and what I know of history I note my what is important. Several years ago if you asked me to describe our time I would have told you that at no time in the history of man have we ever had so many exciting prospects. We stand on the brink of genetic medicine, eliminating disease, ending aging and integrating technology into our bodies that could enable any person to have the wealth of human knowledge and perfect recall connected to their brain in a fraction of a second. By the middle of this century we have in our grasp not only amazing things like neural interfaces but nano machines that have the potential to obsolete virtually everything in our economy by virtualizing physical technology into information and making cell phones and food out of dirt. The technology to reach any destination on earth in a few hours using magneto hydrodynamic drive on utrasonic aircraft and travel to the planets are real. The implications are too difficult to imagine. That was then.

Today I consider that the free and enjoyable civilization that we know could possibly collapse in my lifetime. Bold statement? If you’re not concerned you’re simply not paying attention. Today I see that at no time in my life our future is as it never has been. Not only is the US government budget unsustainable but I don’t recall ever seeing such a naked grab for power for the sake of power in my lifetime. I have never seen such a huge industry of consuming the production of others and spreading insanity for the sake of irrationality. Central to my assertion regarding civilization is the governments of the world over recent centuries. Great Briton was a monarchy that had become more free than others and thus was able to grow empire most effectively. Not being free enough the American colonies broke away and on their second try formed the federal government we have today. It proved to be such a work of genius I have believed that it changed the world as country after country adopted some form of self government and free enterprise. Over the last 100 years the US has been the deciding factor in restoring peace in the world, quashing dictatorships and largely ending the type of war that had gone on for centuries. Just as the Romans felt it was their birthright to rule and dominate the continent the US is now risking not only decline but collapse. Now many intellectuals are looking at China as the new superstar and thinking that their economic success means that governments should consider their model of rule. Nothing could be more disasterous.

China does emulate some aspects of how the US traditionally operated free markets their leaders seem more familiar with US history than a great many of ours. However China has brutal solutions. They mandate the number of children, protesters mysteriously die and censorship is rampant. Due process? Consider that the Chinese prefer to arrest certain religious sects and sentence them to death because their clean lifestyle is considered beneficial when harvesting their organs and selling them on the world market, a lucrative business in China. You could argue that removing organs requires consent there but if a body is not claimed… families seem to always find out late. During the early years of Mao they had the “cultural revolution” which is a nice way of saying book burning and making sure your only access to information and history was government approved. At this time as Mao socialized the farms it is estimated 70,000,000 Chinese died of starvation over a three year period. Mao believed they had population to spare.

Without the US say goodbye to Asia and Australia. It’s an easy conquest and if you believe power comes from the barrel of a gun why not take it? Right now our government spending is exploding. What is our leadership doing? Considering social security is in the red years before expected at with a $15 trillion dollar economy we have a $60 trillion medicare liability why not add the biggest entitlement program yet. Don’t forget actual medicare costs over a decade turned out to be nine times what was initially projected. Of course it may not matter. Soon Iran or some other power could launch a nuclear weapon at the US. Instead of blowing up a city they can explode it five miles up over the center of the US and destroy every unshielded electronic device and power transformer in the US. The irony is our main transformers that could be protected for a few million dollars would take 10 years to replace. In three months we will be ripe for any banana republic to invade and take over. Of course investing in protection from high altitude EMP is less of a priority than pork barrel spending.

So why is our country in such danger? Some argue our leaders are trying to invoke the Cloward Piven strategy of bringing about a collapse so a new system can be built. Some are so intent on intellectual theories that they want to create a grand human experiment. Some have so perverted the disproven Malthusian imperative they actually want billions of people to die so the earth won’t be too crowded. Do you feel too crowded? I would say there is another major consideration. Quite simply There has been a major shift in our world from producing something useful to simply leaching off those who produce. This has empowered an insane mechanism of government and crony capitalism that threatens our very way of life.

When early human society moved from bartering to trading in currency an abstract idea led to enormous opportunities. Trading what you produce no longer required you to trade with the person who had what you needed, but merely with someone who needed what you had. It was essential. Eventually we enabled larger companies by offering stock where you could buy part of the enterprise. This enabled more wealth by making it possible for people to trade currency to facilitate the creation of wealth. Wealth being created by tangible goods, infrastructure and social benefits. Eventually we came to trade derivatives, which almost nobody understands, which are speculations on currency conversion or something of that nature. The US debt clock shows us owing something over $600 trillion there. Note that the worth of everything and everyone in the country doesn’t add up to $50 trillion. People like George Soros make money trashing currencies like the British pound and the Euro. Why? Because the mechanisms are there to speculate on losses and you can legally contribute to those losses causing misery to entire populations for your own profit. Of course the ultimate boondoggle is carbon trading where you are buying and selling permission to emit a gas vital to life on this planet and producing nothing. It’s like mandating commissions to the climate exchange.

Another form of leaching is leaching through legislation. Simply put, if you want to dominate a marketplace and get rich then buy some political power and execute your plan. Say for instance you wanted to make a lot of money with huge wind turbines. Just a side note, small turbines are vastly more cost effective but they fail to be centralized and difficult to compete in. GE is close to the president and looking for laws to be passed to change energy in this country making them a de facto victor as they pretty much own the technology.

Of course the biggest example of leaching ever is the government, federal and state. Here we have people who can levee taxes, set their pay, raise taxes, grant themselves perks and then use the money to buy another term in office. Then they expand the bureaucracy and get their friends much higher paying jobs.

The big question is if the people creating the problem even see it. I don’t have an answer. What I do know is that there is a safe and sane course of action. I was taught how to handle a gun as a child because my parents believed that if you shot and killed someone by accident instead of on purpose they were just as dead. When you take office in the leadership of the good ship United States you ought to assume responsibility for the results of your decisions. “I didn’t realize I was destroying the country” will not be acceptable, but as our founders never considered our leaders would set about destroying our country I can’t point to much more than treason and some arcane laws regarding execution of duties in conflict with constitutional law. Those remedies are rarely used and are for removal from office without any criminal consequences. I think some things done by congress that would result in criminal prosecution if done by a company ought to be criminalized, like “borrowing” from social security for the general fund.

What I have realized recently is that if I were to label myself I would have to be a libertarian. I find John Stossel refreshing as he debunks big brother. I like the quote I read recently, I forget from who. “Take any three letters, arrange them in any order. There’s another government agency we can do without.” Should we be a nation of winers or a nation of winners. Winning requires the possibility of losing. The way to defeat the leaches dragging down our society is to first stop gorging government with so damn much money. Next we need to restore a balance of power to the individual by making government accountable. There is one more thing though…

Whenever anyone comes to you telling you there is this disaster or that disaster keep a cool head. Ask for definite proof they are not lying and look for who is opposing them. Look if it is an appeal to emotion or logic and if it fails the logic test it is almost certainly a manipulation. In order to enslave a world you must first have their trust. I have simple rules regarding trust. Never trust anyone to tell you who to distrust. Never trust anyone unless they are willing to prove their trust in the battleground of open debate. When someone says “trust me”… don’t! Look for the person who says instead “test me” if you want to see if someone can be trusted.

You need to look around and realize something you may never have before. You may need to lead the people you know to realize that this is a crucial time in history. We are facing a choice between an amazing life, a life where even the sting of death might fade, and a horrible world where at worst billions could die to satisfy the misguided acolytes of some stupid English professor proven horribly wrong a century and a half ago and still followed by intellectual morons today. The revolutionary war was fought and won by no more than a quarter to a third of the population and today that fraction thinks what Mao did was A OK. Are you going to be the loyal opposition?

I close with a little wisdom from life. Years ago I took a job at a portrait company where I could get cash daily. I hated how they ran it and quit after a few weeks. To my surprise I was top producer in the country my second week. This company had been around for years and was bought by some of the top sales people. I later read a book warning of what they did next. They stopped teaching what they did to become successful and started teaching and running things they way they thought they should have been. A few years later I saw the company had failed. What made this country successful was the framework laid out by our founders. I also learned in sales that the definition of a problem was a deviation from an established standard and to model the success of others. Marxism has failed! Socialism has failed. We need to realize that experimenting with what we think might work better than what made us the greatest country on earth is certain fro fail, especially if it involves socialism.

Leadership means learning what made America great, telling your friends about it and getting them involved in restoring our greatness. Leaching means getting a government job, putting your fingers in your ears and singing as Rome burns around you.

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I Hate Utopia

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Imagine the worst future possible. Visualize if you will for a second the things we dread. The collapse of civilization, totalitarian big brother, financial morass, war. Throughout human history there have been examples where human life was lived under the boot of ruthless dictators and even deemed undesirable enough to march to their death. When these examples are paraded before the public consciousness they are generally decried as terrible. I say generally because in some cases there are those in media, academia and government who cannot bring themselves to condemn even the most flagrant offenses to human decency because those offenses were done under the guise of the utopian ideology of the observer.

Utopia is of course a wonderful concept of a world filled with perfection and absent any unpleasant struggle. Utopia may also be an afterlife filled with delights. Whatever the case utopia is always a destination for idealists of conjured perfection. As such there could not be anything more insidious in practice and harmful to the course of humanity. Certainly nothing has caused more untimely deaths as utopia has claimed hundreds of millions of lives. I am going to tell you why in no uncertain terms that when someone comes to you extolling utopia you should put garlic around your neck, hold up a cross, throw holy water on them and run for the hills.

Before I explain why every utopia is born under a moon of blood from a father with hoofs and a mother with scales I want to explode the myth of perfection they each hold. A world without strife is a world without challenge. Humans realize fulfillment through overcoming challenge. Without difficulty their is no overcoming and without the possibility of failure there can be no celebration of victory. If you have heard success is a journey not a destination it is because we become listless without challenge and utopia is by definition the ultimate destination. Utopias are born in the selfishness of the singular satisfaction of the recipient of the utopia and without regard to any fabric of civilization. A perfect example is the jihadi idea of being rewarded in the afterlife with a gaggle of virgins for killing unbelievers. Not only does it have no regard for those being killed but it has no regard for the young innocent women who would be subjected to the jihadist’s whims… Then again that could be a poor example as Muslims emulate their prophet who had a predilection for marrying prepubescent girls.

Of course understanding why utopia is hell really requires starting at conception. As utopia is always an alternative to reality we should start by examining social reality. For all the flaws of our civilization it functions as a collection of ideas and practices learned throughout history. I have been told a problem is a deviation from an established standard. Standard practices are established through experience. Human beings are naturally curious and experimentation as a means of learning is fraught with failure. Thus patterns and practices that yield good results are established and for better or worse we codify our societal workings. Then as human beings we progress and learn. Over time we developed more sophistication and now can apply the scientific method which means we have an effective and rational way to measure new ideas and practices. Our society can advance in this way by absorbing and adopting practical ideas.

Utopia is spawned differently. Utopia breaks from the past, ignores the collective experience of thousands of generations and is born of a deviation in response to a challenge. Utopia seeks to rewrite human nature along with human history by erasing the challenge of the frustrated utopian. Clearly this will leave anyone entering said utopia unfulfilled and devoid of victory in their life. Most importantly by pulling up civilization by it’s roots and replanting it there is turmoil and the resulting attempt at perfection begins life as a horribly imbalanced paradigm suffering the repeated failures of generations that the established protocols of civilization had learned to avoid.

Let’s look at where the utopian ideals have led us over the years. Perhaps the most audacious and common utopia is that of the commune. When I asked my parents about it they got me a book on communes in America over the last 200 years. It delivered the amazing failure rate of 100% for hundreds of communes. Of course the benefit is that if you wish to start your own utopia you are not bound by history so the past is no indicator. Actually that tongue in cheek comment illustrates perfectly the most arrogant aspect of utopian idealists, that all others who failed before them did so because they lacked their wisdom and dedication to the cause. Communes fail because they subvert the individual and in the end the expression and fulfillment of our selfish nature is the heart of excellence and accomplishment. Altruism can only flourish where we can fulfill the desires of self first.

Of course the absurd ideas of the commune led to a couple men who had done nothing in their pampered lives, including hold down a job, to write the Communist Manifesto and somehow take on a concern of a workers paradise. Of course it sought revolution, the overthrow of the established social hierarchy for an entirely new experiment. Actually Solomon said wisely there is nothing new under the sun and what was in fact being advocated was the reapplication of a great number of mistakes made by past generations. While the incremental pursuit of perfection may by definition preclude ever achieving utopia the revolutionary pursuit of utopia invariably leads to the morass of dystopia.

The ultimate problem for today’s citizens of exploding dystopian governments is that we tend to think as a society in the incremental mode. The inherent flaw in this is thinking that what we have now was actually subjected to any rational scientific method to prove it’s merit. The fact is for the last half century seemingly all governments have been infected with the utopian thinking that had been killing over a hundred million people in a few countries earlier in the twentieth century. So today when we talk about a massive overhaul of health care it is in fact pursuit of utopia, and while I can go point by point on the inherent flaws there mere fact it chases utopia should be all you need to know. However when you look at all our social programs you will see utopia written all over them. End all suffering and make a perfect world. Foolishness.

You should not assume I like suffering, even though in fact I believe challenges and failure are essential to shaping our lives. What I happen to believe though is that a faceless gargantuan bureaucracy assisting us is quintessential dystopia. Charitable organizations can help people more effectively and more cost effectively. Every place where we have pursued utopia we have created irrational and unsustainable messes. Social security is an example. It may have sounded good, but consider how much good all that money would have done in the investment community to grow our economy instead of yanked out. Everyone today would be millionaires if they had invested wisely. Of course millions of people plan retirement around this pittance because it’s there. What if it weren’t? I’m betting they could do better.

When someone says to you “wouldn’t it be nice if…” just remember that likely as not it is the opening to a longing for utopia. Knowing that utopia is fatally flawed is liberating. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to pay our bills?” If nobody paid their bills there would be nothing to buy because everyone would be out of business. Is it an absolute certainty that any attempt at utopia will fail? I’ve been told by physicists that it is theoretically possible for an event to happen which could have a cascade effect of changing the laws of physics in our universe. As a rule we plan on the laws of physics working. An attempt at utopia could work… and the bonds of all matter could dissolve. The success rate for utopia so far is 0% out of who knows how many thousands of tries. The methodology for arriving at utopia is clearly broken.

Utopia is at the heart of the looming financial meltdown of Western civilization. I say we root it all out. A society of compassionate individuals is vastly preferable to the pursuit of utopia which invariably is pursued through growing gargantuan faceless bureaucracy into dystopia.

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