Eric’s Blog

I read in Engadget that Microsoft claims Android infringes on their patents. Of course they won’t say what, they just want money. Worse yet HTC has coughed up a license fee as they make both Windows and Android phones. I say boycott them all. This is utter bullflop. Microsoft already tried this with Linux with no success. This same approach was taken by SCO suing IBM over Linux with backing from Microsoft. They also wouldn’t say and as anti IBM pundits shrilly decried the end SCO rightly went the way of the dodo bird. The worst of all of this was when it was threatened that end users would be sued. SCO used this ploy.

Am I the only one who sees horrible irony here? A patent is a government granted monopoly. Microsoft is one of many companies to be sued for abusing a monopoly but the only one in the last century to brazenly ride it out to conviction. Shouldn’t some restriction on their monopoly activities been the result? In fact after they offered a “punishment” of providing software to schools, an actual lock in scheme, nobody can remember the slap on the hand they got. It was pathetic. Microsoft’s entire business model has been lock in from the time they inked the deal with IBM and sent Paul Allen to complete the purchase of an operating system knock off they didn’t develop.

This is just another example of what is wrong with patent law. The idea of patents was it was supposed to protect inventors so they could develop an idea and be rewarded for having developed it. Isn’t that what the free market is for? What I remember was years ago hearing the news that an Oregon billionaire had died leaving his money to his wife. What did he produce to make all that money? Hot air. He started in the 1950s reading popular mechanics and other magazines. Whenever a far off technology was talked about that we could not yet do he would file a patent. Then when those ideas finally came forward he would wait until they were very successful… then he would pounce and sue. When the web took off I was studying making web sites and found that someone had patented the electronic shopping cart and was extracting money from successful internet businesses. For years web developers were frustrated by GIF image files as they were the only way to offer transparency and small animations. The company who developed the compression algorithm had waited decades and now randomly picked web sites and charged $5,000. Ironically this was made worse by Microsoft dominating the browser market and taking over five years to implement alternatives. Monopolists don’t have to care, they get your money no matter how bad they are… sort of like bad government and taxes.

Patents are a nightmare. I would not say I am against all patents. I would say any patent application that could make it’s case in a public hearing that it cannot proceed without protection should be given fair hearing. However I think the concept of patents is probably as defective as Keynesian economics. Let’s look at some reasons why. The big kahuna of patent portfolios in tech is IBM. They have dozens of lawyers on staff and have spent millions of dollars on what amounts to the software equivalent of mutually assured destruction. If they went at it tooth and nail with Microsoft the net result would be world war in the tech industry, millions of losses, fabulously wealthy attorneys and worldwide economic impact. In short, pretty much nobody enforces these patents except in select and limited cases where they see specific advantage tactically. It’s less about the patent than business warfare. Why? Because virtually every piece of software you use probably violates some patent. Enforcing patent law is the most expensive form of the most expensive enterprise.

Of course the big argument for patents is pharmaceutical research. Interestingly most drugs are based on natural compounds which cannot be patented. The pharmaceutical industry will never offer a vitamin or herb remedy. Why? There simply isn’t the money in it that there is in getting a monopoly granted by the government. The real cost though is not developing the drugs, it’s the obscene hurdles the FDA places on it that insure that anything to do with medicine or drugs is so expensive only the most wealthy players can cross the finish line. I personally prefer natural medicine and resort to prescription drugs as a last resort while most doctors hand them out like candy. The question is whether this whole patent process has made things better by making expensive synthetics the only viable model. To my mind this has distorted the free market, not helped it.

But of course in the world of technology we have benefited from patents encouraging development, right? Let’s consider it. In the late 1960s several interesting things were happening. One of them was a few software engineers developing a new computer language called C which was then used to make the first portable operating system called Unix. The other was DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Association) addressing concerns with telephones going down during a war. Telephones connected through exchanges making for point to point communications. DARPA had the idea you could make a more robust system by putting information into packets and telling it where to go, then it could traverse a web of exchanges to reach it’s destination and be assembled into a message. The idea was so radical that when AT&T engineers were exposed to it they said it was impossible. Yet by 1969 they succeeded. In the 1970s this was a private network developed by universities for possible governmental use. Berkley wanted to have Unix like abilities and created a clone called BSD. AT&T sued.

The key aspect to Unix and BSD was that computers have application software and hardware. Previous to the operating system idea each piece of software had to know specifics about every piece of hardware it interacted with. Operating systems originally were specific to their hardware. Unix ran everywhere. Creating openness was a boon. AT&T eventually lost their case and it was sealed. It must be interesting. BSD became the preferred web server on the university web and another AT&T engineer developed C++ to handle larger projects.

Fast forward into the 1980s as personal computers were taking off with the PC and Apple. IBM didn’t patent the PC and clone makers came in and drove the price down. Microsoft DOS was sold with every PC and competing companies like DR DOS were forced out, like when Microsoft came out with Windows where they made sure it didn’t run on top of any other DOS, before it became a monolithic product in Windows 95. If you wanted to get online in the 1980s you probably uses a BBS which was an electronic bulletin board. Companies sprang up to offer more services. First Compuserve ruled, then in the 1990s AOL passed them. The internet soldiered on as a university web with protocols for email, file transfer and the hot new Gopher protocol. However while building the supercolider in CERN they had a problem with sharing text. So they developed the Hyper Text Transport Protocol so that whatever computer you were running you could view text and click on links. You see it now in every web address as “http://”.

Al Gore once claimed to have invented the internet, but it was George Bush Sr who signed it into law so that everyone could access it. Something happened. Companies like Compuserve and AOL became access points to the web, the web took off and private internet service providers rose. BSD was the preferred web server but a new operating system kernel called Linux was being developed and took off. Scripting languages starting with Perl were running the web. Sun developed the Java language to take advantage of computing over the web. Microsoft was late to the game. You know much of the rest.

DARPA developed the TCP/IP transport protocol for packets of data over the internet. CERN developed HTTP. Berkley developed servers. Larry Wall developed Perl. All of this was free for anyone to use for any purpose, which is why everyone is using it. Amazon wrote a few lines of code and developed “One Click” purchasing in the 1990s and created a firestorm over patents. It would be like inventing the radiator cap and getting control over the auto industry because you were the only one who could sell it. Why did the intenet beat AOL? It was open. More importantly why is the Linux based server the most popular on the internet? BSD is licensed in such a way anyone can use it for anything. Microsoft was unable to write a TCP/IP stack that didn’t degenerate to garbage in a few months so they used the BSD stack. Works good doesn’t it? They alienated virtually every tech company. The clear alternative was Linux and the GNU tools. the reason was the GNU GPL license. Even though BSD was better Linux had a license that required distributed improvements to be shared. The operating system with GNU/Linux moved more toward a shared public utility. Google was built on inexpensive Linux networks. Tivo and other devices leveraged Linux. Android, using Linux and Java, is rapidly taking over phones, largely at the expense of Microsoft, and moving into tablets. Apple is beating Microsoft amazingly with devices and services, though it appeared dead 15 years ago. Slowly but surely the former giant of the computing industry is becoming as marginalized as they made IBM.

So we come back to the fundamental question of patents. Clearly the most remarkable impact in the last century has been the internet. It is the revolution of a printing press for every man. Yet every single stage of development of this technology was open. In fact much of the software development done today is done because people need it for a tool, not an end product. Linux qualifies for this and ironically if you have an Android or BlackBerry or other phone you have a device running Linux and Java. Microsoft can’t really sue Linux or Java because they already tried and failed. They could sue Google, but going after phone makers are an easy target. Why? It may be easier to give them money than risk them shutting down your business… You know, like Vinnie with the bruised knuckles in South Chicago worrying that something may happen if your business isn’t protected. Except of course this is done with the full force of law, millions of dollars to attorneys and and a government that has helped the little guy succeed and the consumer to be vastly enriched through the use of patents. And all we had to do was give up free markets for monopolies, higher prices and legal bullying.

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.

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.

Anyone who reads my blog knows I am greatly concerned about reckless government spending and the future of America. I recently looked over Paul Ryan’s Raodmap for America’s Future and was very impressed. I’ve long supported a flat tax.

As I thought about this and many related things I realized some key problems we have in America. First of all our elected representatives are sent to Washington to serve us. Most of them are not. The reasons are explained nicely in this video explaining that the largess of government is the root of the problem. 2009 shattered records for government spending, borrowing and no surprisingly lobbyist revenue. It becomes clear that no matter how you attempt to reign in taxes and spending there is no proposed system to assure government won’t spiral out of control with crony capitalism and power and wealth in bed. Corruption is like a weed.

I’ve come across some good ideas but essentially I feel we need to focus on reality. Allow me to explain reality as is pertinent to human beings. You can either complain about the nature of human beings and suffer that the always fall short or you can recognize the nature and change the game so that they always exceed your expectations. For example when someone offends you if you immediately initiate a hostile dispute you engender hostility in return. If you approach the person with the idea that you are sure that they did not mean to offend you and explain how a problem resulted from what they did most people will want to demonstrate their goodwill and there is no dispute.

Do you doubt our nature? I was astonished to hear the other day that even in recent years with economic difficulties the US has been realizing over $300 billion a year in charitable giving. The recent Haiti disaster again showed what America is made of with hundreds of millions donated. We are by far the most generous people per capita in the world. We feel good when we are given the opportunity to help someone. We don’t particularly enjoy when someone responds to difficulty by holding us and gunpoint and robbing us while they apologize.

This brings me to my idea. Why the hell did we even do a 16th amendment and create an income tax? Could anything be more evil. The very people we elect to represent us manage the money and insure it is collected, then vote themselves raises with it. Can you imagine our founding fathers setting up such an unchecked unbalanced structure? I can’t. On top of that so many taxes are hidden they epitomize the axiom “out of sight, out of mind”. One flat tax proposal I recall was to send it in on a postcard at whatever percent of your income it was set at. Recently I got a better idea. See how you like this.

First of all every agency of the government has a manager and most have inspector generals. This derives from an idea I recently heard. Set the salary for all managers at national average. Set specific operational requirement targets for the agency or division. People using the government service rank it. Falling below a passing level docks pay, exceeding it incurs bonuses. An inspector general for fraud and waste produces a report on agency performance. Performance below a passing level docks pay and above incurs bonuses. Any additional efficiencies and savings offer a percentage bonus to management provided it doesn’t lower effective performance. Savings and performance bonuses are made available on a smaller scale to employees.

As far as government employees are concerned they work for the American people and as such there is no reason to assume collective bargaining. Unions have been raping companies but especially the government and it is why the average American job pays $44K/yr and the average government job pays $75K/yr. That has to stop and new pay, benefits and retirement plans negotiated. Otherwise we become Greece. BTW negotiated here means public hearings. If government employees are unhappy about losing their largess I think there are a few unemployed people who would be happy to have a new job!

One more thing. Power changes. Anything that would land you in jail as an executive at a public company ought to do likewise for any government employee or congressional representative. Borrowing from social security or pensions? Go to jail!

This brings me to the part which is my idea. No more taxes. Each agency posts on the internet the annual budget it is requesting. This can be discussed online and by news outlets and public information channels. Here’s the good part. Instead of the government holding a gun to your head and extracting taxes we do away with taxes. Since you’re no longer paying taxes you can certainly afford to help keep your government running. Hey, I’d love to see the president get on a public TV channel and pitch for money for a government agency. Money can only be spent that is put into that agency. Transferring funds is illegal.

So right now congress has a 10% approval rating. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that congressional funding might be down at the moment and I’m just guessing here but I bet that a really skinny paycheck would get their attention and get the leadership off it’s royal attitude. I suggest mandating that funds collected in excess of request divert by default to debt service and debt service is one option citizens could choose. By going to the main page you could see what agencies most needed your money. Now let’s say the EPA tries to use the carbon scam to regulate without legislation. We have an answer for an agency too big for their britches. When their money starts to drop there will be an outcry for new management… but then again with a really poor rating that manager might as well quit… unless they like paying fines to work.

I don’t believe as a people we would knowingly let our government fail to operate, but right now most people feel the government is not only failing to operate well but threatening our liberty. I would ask exactly what motivation our government has to behave any differently? We’re going to need to elect people with amazing courage to stop handing out candy which we dearly love and which will probably lose them their job for saving the country. Then again if they fail to do what they should or get sucked into the culture of corruption our government will fail, and by this I mean economic and social collapse. It’s not something a reasonable person can question. When you owe more money than there is and your debt is growing faster than you can ever pay it back while your currency is based on trust it’s game over. That day is coming.

we’ve been looking at how to deal with the subversion of the founder’s ideals based on what we have done. Wudrow Wilson gave us the federal reserve and the income tax, among his horrible contributions leading us to two world wars and more. FDR gave us social security, a Ponzi scheme time bomb that unravels when life expectancy rises and birth rates drop. JFK gave us unions in government. LBJ gave us the great society and medicare. Our current congress and president is just hitting it with steroids.

The government has no business in our retirement or helping the poor. I believe any organization that wants to work in this charitably should be able to apply for a certification license. If audited and certified by the government those charitable causes would be listed on government web sites and information as audited and certified organizations where their accounting records are verified as to their legitimacy as a charity. Clearly this would cost money and their would be no taxes, thus no deduction, but obtaining this certification would make a charitable cause much more high profile and give it far greater access to funds.

Along with this there should be a balanced budget amendment that allows an exception only for war or natural disaster. One consequence would be the elimination of a lot of government waste. There would be government jobs lost. However other benefits would ensue. Currently education for instance holds states hostage by handing them money with strings attached. Seems to me that is the wrong direction for such assertion of force. If we decided we were unhappy with our public education system being centrally controlled by a government listening only to teachers unions who donate heavily to their sycophantic and usually Democratic congressmen we could change all that by closing the purse. Now if Washington isn’t benefiting us we simply defund them and fund our state and local education.

Here’s what puzzles me. How did a bunch of peasant farmers and citizen militias manage to defeat the largest and most powerful army and navy in the world to gain our independence over a 2% tax on tea… and somehow this spawned a nation with the central idea of “you can’t fight city hall”? We can do anything and we can feel much better doing if it we know we are insuring freedom. One last thought on this whole idea. I believe we would not let government fail, but if we enacted my plan the economic explosion in this country would be unlike any seen before.

At 140 characters Twitter is a far better place for links than debates. I love it for the brevity of fishing for topics of interest. However it seems now people want to challenge comments and ideas and Twitter seems perfect for it. Let me explain. Americans have always demonstrated the best and worst of human tendencies. At our heart we are a noble people infused with the core values of freedom. At the same time we raise generations of pampered children who are ready to attach everything to jingoistic 30 second sound bites. Worst of all we are less influenced by Jefferson and Madison and more by Alinsky and Marx. Twitter is perfect. You can easily sling a good insult in 140 characters. Not so framing a rational debate.

Today is the anniversary of the communist manifesto and it seems apropos for such lamentations. After all Marx was a self loathing rich boy from a Jewish family. It is ironic that even Josef Goebbels noted that nationalism was the principle difference between communism and Nazism and the Jews suffered under both. Isn’t it ironic that a couple guys who never did any work said they were for a workers paradise. Imagine people with no work or administrative experience formulating policy. 100,000,000 people died at the hands of their own government and yet I fear most people chanting “public option” have no idea that Hitler nationalized medicine and more and could not say who said “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”.

Likewise I suspect when people are asking if you are a birther or calling you a racist they are unfamiliar with the specific description of the character attack they are using from Rules for Radicals and probably have never heard of Alinsky. Forget asking about Cloward and Piven. I’m going to go out on a limb and say I bet most of these people doing the rah rah chant for their blessed leader don’t know the difference between the deficit and the debt. Then why should they. Kieth Olberman clearly doesn’t. Here are some things to ask these Obama-bots. Do they know what GDP is, what percent of GDP our total debt is, how debt is financed and how inflation works. Have they looked at their portion they owe for our national debt. Look here to get an idea.

Here’s a question, know what a Ponzi scheme is? Compare it to your steate employee pension plan and social security. There are thousands of elected officials not going to jail because they write the laws and government seems to be exempted from the same standards people are held to. What about government of the people for the people and by the people? It’s government of the people for the special interests by the elite. 10 more years of doing just what we’re doing and Western civilization may want to learn Chinese. Go look up PIIGS on google.

So how about some ground rules. If you want to criticize me for saying I liked Glenn Beck’s speech at CPAC here’s what you need to do. First of all get a grip. I’m not a fanboy. I listen critically to everyone. If Glenn Beck were to say everything Obama said was a lie I’d switch him off and never watch again. Don’t get me wrong, Obama lies. C-Span anyone? But nobody lies all the time. Anyone making absolute statements like this demonstrates they are an idiot. Take anyone and I will agree with some of what they say. I agree with many things Obama said and disagree with many. I support some of his policies and disagree with others.

If you are being critical of someone and using character attacks or painting them with an absolutest brush you have a problem. Life isn’t a comic book and political discourse is not a WWF event. Oh, and just in case you thought pro wrestling was real they all have SAG cards. For the truly illiterate, they are actors. If you disagree with someone you are not accepted as an intelligent person worthy of discourse if you can’t say what you disagree with them on. For instance I disagree with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly about suspending second amendment rights over weather.

Here is the second rule of intelligent discourse. If you disagree with somebody like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck then you have to have given them a chance and watched or listened for a week or two. Otherwise it is what courts call hearsay, which means it’s not your observation but the opinion of somebody else. I’m not willing to grant the same level of trust to a third party because if I ask you why they hold that opinion you won’t know. Odds are good that it isn’t theirs either. I mean if Susie told Billy told Johnny told you why should I assume your opinion means anything. You’re just some nitwit spewing garbage out of peer pressure. That doesn’t work with adult conversation, just valley girls.

Finally let’s consider how smart you are. You’re awfully smart aren’t you? Mommy and daddy parked you in front of Hannah Montana and now you are ready to lecture the world. Just one problem. You may not know this but adults with intellectual curiosity who recognize things like the absurdity of wielding absolutism and the disgusting nature of Alinsky tactics… Those people may fail to be impressed by your cutesy tweets that vapidly regurgitate lamestream media idiots.

Today the Rasmussen presidential approval poll showed a new low of only 22% who strongly approve of president Obama with 41% strongly disapproving. There was only a total 45% approval with a 54% disapproval. When I wonder who these 22% are and whether they have completely insulated themselves from any news or are simply incapable of critical thought… perhaps unfortunate emblems of our pathetic public education system… I realize that possibly they might be one of the two or three people still watching MSNBC. They might actually think Alan Grayson is an intellectual instead of a vapid charleton opportunist playing to those who believe the WWF is real life high drama.

I have been asked before if I am ever wrong. I find there are three classical approaches to being wrong. The sadly limited one are those people who know they will much things up and keep quiet. The vast majority simply choose to ignore the possibility and call others names who point out their foolishness. I take the more rare position of those who speak out. I really hate to be wrong, so before I speak out I do my due diligence to insure I do not suffer the mea culpa.

May I suggest you consider the ideas I presented here and keep in mind this most basic. “What if I’m wrong”. It’s a simple question. The most wonderful thing about discussing and debating is learning something new. As with chess we can only learn from our mistakes. I have delighted in learning, but after all these years I am content now to mostly be right. If I am wrong and you can prove it I will offer my mea culpa. You should do likewise.

It has long been known that the truth is easy to tell but a lie requires much better packaging. There is also the old adage about fooling people. Sadly I think the real truth is who you can and who you cannot fool. For this I need to come back to another truism, the person in the world that is easiest to lie to is yourself. I asked someone this once and they replied it was them, not self. An easy confusion and a pathetic statement. if you think about an examination of truth and open with the easiest person to lie to being ourselves then the logical extension is that since trust must start within it is impossible to rationally arrive at any truth.

This reminds me of the great comedy line “everything you know is wrong” which of course is a delicious paradox because if you know this to be true and at once wrong it cannot be. Delightful as this comedic line is I ask you to instead start with the honest concession that if self is the easiest person to lie to then anything you believe could potentially be based on a deception. Now let us examine why our self is the easiest to delude. Would you ever knowingly do harm to yourself? Of course not. It was this calm confidence that led me as a three year old to try sticking a penny into a wall socket under construction. Needless to say my mother was distressed but my father pointed out I would not be repeating that shocking experience. Good point.

The reason we can so easily delude ourselves is that we operate on the belief that the ideas that pop into our heads are trustworthy. In every venture I have ever done I have had people approach me with lots of “great” ideas. What is to me astonishing is the invariable truths I know about their ideas. Invariably no matter how obvious they act as if their moment of introspection is a revelation that my years of deep involvement would not have considered. They also have given no consideration to the difficulty or effort of applying the idea. Finally they fail to realize that it is almost certain I evaluated this idea and many others in my years of application they are not privy to. Why do I point this out? Because people not only trust their ideas, they seem universally to have a complete lack of comprehension what it takes to see an idea through to completion. Thus the fact that most projects are never finished and most people are much more comfortable with a boss to promise them a paycheck than to really compete for their money… not that there is anything wrong with that. It’s just an insulation from one of the most interesting experiences to shape our lives.

Getting back to our problem of self trust, information begins to flow into our mind at a young age in a very disorderly format. As a boy of 14 I began pondering this and how it affected my inconsistencies and inability to parse information. I began a several month mental reorganization effort that shaped my life. it was by no means an inoculation from irrational ideas or self deception but I like to think it helped me to honestly recognize my own irrationality and correct it. We develop beliefs and ideas in our lives at different times and reference those value judgments through our lives, but sometimes our values change. Sometimes we need to rethink and clean house.

This is my little routine. This is how I clean house and keep it clean. I believe that most of what we do is by rote, which is to say it is remembered action, like walking or driving a car. A smaller percentage of what we do is by reason, like solving problems. Each has it’s benefits and if our brains lack one we are rendered incapable of functioning normally. What I do is realize that rote is faster and more consistent, but distrust it nonetheless. I try to do two things. First I try to rebuild my rote behavior with reason and second I look to randomly question what I’m doing to see if my rote behavior is serving my rational ends.

I have a hierarchy of trust. I trust most ideas that have been demonstrated and proven. I offer more trust to information sources that prove to be true. I offer the least trust to unknown and unproven sources. My simple filter is prove it. I inherently distrust information. Now some people say “why would this person lie to me?” and I say “That’s a good question, why do you think?” It’s important to realize that I’m not saying that everyone who may appear to have a motive to lie is lying. I’m saying I’d like to have a look at that motive.

Now if someone tells me we are killing the planet and someone disagrees the argument today is that the person who doesn’t believe in global warming must be in the pocket of the oil companies. Okay, prove it. But while we’re at it I have a question. How is it that only one side here has a financial motive? Mr Gore might you have a motive? A billion dollars in carbon credits certainly looks enticing to me. Could you be absolutely impartial if you were playing for a billion dollars? As it happens I have an opinion because I have researched this and I know there is a hell of a lot more money in the Enron carbon trading scheme. However the interesting thing is asking the question what carbon trading will accomplish. It seems it will end up having little effect on carbon and if it did it wouldn’t matter because China isn’t playing and is building two coal plants a week. It will however move a lot of money from our pockets to the pockets of people like Al Gore and Goldman Sachs who used their AIG payback to buy 10% of the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Now if I just lost you here because you believe that every time you sneeze the CO2 kills a polar bear then I remind you to ask yourself the question… “what if I’m wrong?” Why do I believe what I believe? What information source has proven trustworthy. When Ronald Reagan was elected I was getting my information from Saturday Night Live and I was upset. I hated seeing smug guys in suits celebrating. A few years later I dealt with the simple fact. I had seen the economy turn around Reagan was right. Thus began my transformation. Today he is condemned for signing congressional budgets into law that, even though his tax cuts doubled tax revenue in a decade and created the largest single economic boom in history, led to deficits. Ask yourself the difference between making money and spending money and if you can be solvent from only one of the two.

I saw Glenn Beck’s speech at CPAC today and I think he is an interesting guy. I don’t agree with everything he says but I have seen that he does an amazing amount of reading and has a huge research department. As much as he is hated on the left I think if he was saying stupid and untrue things there would be a field day. Beck pointed out he started college but could not afford to continue. He was self educated and proud of it. I have often been told that I seem well educated, but like our founders who I think are brilliant and I am not worthy to compare to I am like Beck. I took my education as my own responsibility. What has been amazing to me is what I have learned since I left school.

Most Americans agree the revolutionary war and the civil war are the among the most exceptional stories of our history, but what do they know about it. Do they know more men died freezing to death in Valley forge than in battle? Do they know that most of the signers of the declaration of independence lost their fortunes or their lives during the war? Do they know that in both wars you could follow the marches by looking for the blood in the road from those who could not afford boots? Do they know that shortly before re-election Abraham Lincoln was not only looking like he would lose but he was opposed by all of congress, his cabinet and his wife? When asked if he should declare marshal law he declined as he saw it as great a violation of his oath to the constitution as the South’s succession? Amazingly after Katrina the second amendment was suspended.

I think perhaps the greatest tragedy today in America is a lessor version of China’s cultural revolution. Remember that? Probably not. Look it up. Essentially Mao wanted to break ties with the past and look forward. At least that is what he said. However destroying all they could of their history, writings and grand tradition was for the simple purpose that it is easier to transform and oppress a people who have lost their identity than one who has a tradition to protect. Today we call it revisionism. In America it is everywhere. Schools wanting history to only go back to the late 1800s. Rock and roll artists wearing the image of the cold blooded murderer Che Guevera who outlawed rock and roll. White house staffers extolling their admiration for Mao tse Tung who killed 70,000,000 of his own people.

What president signed the sedition act which outlawed public speech against government policies? What president introduced the federal reserve bank and gave us the 16th amendment and the progressive income tax? What president gave us prohibition? The answer to all the above is Wudrow Wilson who ran for re-election promising to keep us out of war and promptly put us there. He also laid the groundwork for the UN and for the rise of Adolf Hitler and his progressive movement was upset in the 1930s that Germany was ahead of the US in eugenics… ideas that were far less popular after the Nazis took this American idea and created the holocaust with it.

Navigating the truth is much more difficult when we fail to know the essential point of reference that is history. Those people who could make good have traditionally prospered in business in America. Those who could not appear to have contrived to prosper in the ivory towers of education with their tenure protecting them from any form of competition and the halls of government. By government I don’t mean elected officials, I mean the public employee unions that already get 30%-40% more than comparable private sector jobs and 90% salary pensions after 30 years.

Am I rambling? Perhaps. It’s just that truth is of little use if there is no freedom to benefit from it. A wise prisoner is still a prisoner, and this is why it is important to ask if the glossy pamphlet of a wonderful life before you is actually a gilded cage. Now is a very good time to start asking questions instead of simply taking on the 30 second sound bite jingoistic claims of some politician. In fact if there is anyone I would say has the highest bar before I will give them any trust it is anyone in politics. They are not all liars, the convenient ideologues response when it is clear their guy is lying, but I operate on the assumption that until they can point to evidence I can believe they are assumed to be lying.

Here are some questions I don’t think we ask enough. Why does the government need to borrow so much money and how do they see our financial standing after perpetually going backward $10T a decade? Why are government jobs paying almost half again what private sector jobs are and getting getting huge raises and lavish pensions? Why do government employees need labor unions to negotiate with governments that don’t make a profit or handle our money responsibly? Why is the answer to every problem throwing more money at it and more government programs? How many times can we raise taxes before we just give up and send our entire income in and live off the government programs?

I think this is the most difficult idea for so many people. Why would this or that politician or media figure lie to me? Good question. I think asking a good question without looking for a good answer is a good way to end up asking why you believed a pack of lies after you have suffered the consequences. I saw a recent poll that showed 35% of the population admitted they voted for Obama. What happened to the other 20% and why would they lie about that?

When I was in High school back in the 1970s I got the idea that capitalism was malevolent and communism was a more perfect utopia. I wonder how an American teenager could get such an idea? I bugged my parents about it and then they did something really cool. The got me a book on communes in America over the last 200 years. I was so happy. I set about reading about my perfect utopia… The more I read the more disturbed I became. Commune after commune failed and usually rather quickly. I began to rifle through the book. Just as I thought, not a single commune lasted more than a few years and all failed miserably. I was quite upset and confronted my parents as to why they got me the book only about communes that failed. They assured me they got the book about all communes.

This was the really great thing about my parents and why I think America can still be okay. My parents taught me how to think, then they trusted me to evaluate and make decisions. What a beautiful concept. Tell me you do this with your kids because if you do everything will be alright. I was forced to come to the obvious conclusion that communes, and by extention communism, was a losing proposal. It was years later that I finally understood the reasons why and the brilliance of capitalism being in fact the only humane economic system in the history of the world. Adam Smith from Scotland posited these ideas in the Wealth of Nations.

When I was young I lived through the cold war with the Soviet Union and USSR contained the word socialist, not communist as we inaccurately called them. I learned the difference between a socialist and a communist was that communism was full equality without a leader and socialism was communism with a ruling class. Of course this failed in socialist governments because people had no incentive, but more over central government was the order of the day. They said the day farmers plowed their field and farmers went out in the mud and broke the axles on their tractors to comply. Excuse me, the government’s tractor. There are two things I learned about socialism. First of all it is about equal outcome as opposed to US capitalism being about equal opportunity. Like working with fractions equal outcomes inevitably lead to sharing the lowest common denominator, financial misery. The other thing I learned is the world is full of people who believe that everyone has failed before them because, well… those other people weren’t as wonderful and wise. It’s a fools errand.

Perhaps Margret Thatcher said it best when she said “The problem with socialism is you run out of other people’s money”. That sums it up nicely. When I was 16 one of the books I was required to read was called “The Population Bomb” by Dr Paul Ehrlich. I learned the word scenario there. It offered three horrible scenarios. Much of humankind was due to die off in the 1980s due to either disease, starvation of going insane like rats in a maze and killing each other. Why is it from nursery rhymes on we are so intent on scaring the hell out of children. I lived in dread… until it didn’t happen. I later heard about Dr Ehrlich losing a bet on precious metals prices over 10 years disproving further his apocalyptic ideas. I assumed his star had faded, but now I find years later he is a tenured professor and darling of the green movement.

Years later I find that in fact this idiot was just recycling the works of the English scholar Malthus from the early 1800s. Malthus had no understanding of agriculture but was convinced that from the 1800s on agricultural output would grow at a linear rate while population would grow exponentially. Therefore it was only a matter of a few decades before huge segments of the population starved to death. I don’t recall world population numbers but it was nowhere near a billion. Still this idiotic hand wringing took off in intellectual circles faster than a Friday the 13th movie with silly teenagers. For nearly 200 years Malthusians (I realize that doesn’t sound like an ism but humor me) have been moving the bar on how many people the planet can support. Now if you are an average plain spoken person who looks at things like two and two I don’t have to tell you how this adds up, but not for Malthusians. Now many of these ideas have morphed and merged with Marxist ideals, which is very comfortable with mass segments of the population dying off, essentially lesser races. However now it’s more like those of us not elitist enough to understand. Many groups now want to reduce the world population by 90%.

I know what you’re thinking, but hold on. Population growth is already in the decline, especially in Europe, but the US too. Is that a good thing? Well actually it may save some land but it causes economic contraction. Imagine we were employing people like crazy, then think about our current unemployment. Now think about unemployment getting a lot worse, but in fact it’s just less people in the economic system. The system contracts. At 90% it implodes like a trigger on an H bomb. I don’t actually know what you call this ism but it’s what I call hard core watermelon.

A watermelon is someone professing to be green on the outside, but on the inside pushing a Marxist agenda. The mix is really toxic. Some people, famous people, seem to think poor people are happier than us wealthy industrialized people. You know, people who can’t get clean water, have high infant mortality rates and have to use animals to haul things in carts so the streets stink and they have open sewers and disease… But they’re happy, or at least they are too busy trying to stay alive to tweet how unhappy they are that their latte was not foamy enough today.

The bottom line is that elitists are ready to do horrible things to society for our own good, but keep in mind that just like Al Gore with his private jet, outrageous electric bill and SUVs the prescription for our misery in the name of simple happiness need not affect their air conditioned comfort. As always the big problem with free enterprise is that we might get uppity and show up at their country club. It doesn’t matter how irrational the idea is, that it’s clearly disproved or that popular opinion no longer supports it. Witness our president pushing the same old health care take over and cap and tax while congress and the IPCC implode. It’s not about what they say it is. It’s about power, control and massive wealth transfers until we are all happy… happy to be relieved of our troubling economic guilt. Hey, if the medicine kills some of us just remember, you can’t make an omelette…

Before I sign off I know what the remaining skeptics are saying. Isn’t capitalism and ism? Okay, maybe so, but what is it? Capitalism is being able to produce something of value and trade freely with others keeping the fruit of your labor. Before we were civilized I think that’s what we did. Then governments came along and assumed ownership of our asses and told us what we could keep. Marxism came along and said none of it was ours because we all owned it but never mind because your wealth is siphoned off by the party. So my distinction is capitalism is not so much an ism as it is a respect for human rights. The isms are attempts to create utopia without regard for human suffering caused by flawed thinking.

A few years ago if you asked me about the future I would have told you how amazing it will be because of technology. Imagine neural interfaces, augmented reality, genetic repair, organ clones, many times longer life spans. The technology is within reach to make any city on earth a two hour trip with propulsion technologies that can take us to speeds approaching mach 20 in the atmosphere. Leisure time was due to become the major industry and forget about civilization getting smashed by an asteroid like the dinosaurs. That was then…

Today I’m reminded of the expression “crossing the Rubicon” because it is as if we are coming up on it quick. If you don’t know your history Roman legions were required to disband before crossing the Rubicon river so as not to bring a powerful enough force into Rome to overthrow the government. Rome started as a rare self governing society ruled by a senate. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and made himself emperor. In short order his popularity faded with resentment of his power and he was assassinated by members of the senate, even including his friends. Caesar may have had a short reign but the die was cast and emperors remained for centuries.

Today we are at a crossroads where ideologies our founding fathers would consider bizarre are placing us at huge risk. I was astonished to hear today that Al Queda terrorists wanted in Egypt and the US have safe haven in the UK. I guess they are protecting them from inhumane punishment. The Christmas bomber had a UK education where he was exposed to jihad. I was actually relieved to read that most Americans view socialism unfavorably the other day, but then those who know me know how much I admire Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln said after helping the fledgling railroads beat the Mississippi river boats with a few minute closing argument that he would give up six points to get the seventh… if the seventh was the most important.

If you get nothing else get this. We face difficult economic times today but we can recover. However we are seeing China race forward to overtake us just as we overtook the UK a century ago. Why does this matter? Well it depends on your values. China adopted socialism after WW II but their government is really a blend of traditional Chinese government at the local level with a central authoritarian state. True to all Marxist regimes their people paid the price. It’s estimated 70,000,000 people died under Mao. I want to be clear, Mao didn’t care! He felt that China could spare a few million. In fact when presented with the tens of millions of deaths be starvation in the third year of his failed farm reforms he replied “Maybe it’s not my best idea”. Today China has a booming business supplying donor organs and major social issues where men outnumber women 30 to 1 because of their policies. Why do I bring this up?

The United States is important not just to our 300 million people. Today we are taught we are terrible ugly resource hogs. In fact I remember being fed this guilt trip in the 1970s in school. I don’t want to get side tracked. I just want to make the case that if the US ceases to be the leading power in the world then the freedom and self governance that came into the world following our bright shining city on the hill example, that light of freedom could go out. And not just in other countries.

So now I’ll make my point. Here it is. The party is over! Let’s get the partisanship out of the way up front. Would you agree that if the US government were to go bankrupt, our currency were to collapse, our ability to defend ourselves dissipated… would you agree that is a problem that goes beyond politics? Ironically Al Gore has been saying for about 10 years we have 10 years left. It’s a shame that I must also tell the tale of the boy who cried wolf. Al Gore was clearly wrong, but if you want to argue that then please be aware if you can’t cite hard facts that are indisputable, without resorting to calling those who disagree names, then you don’t have anything. I have seen credible people speculate that we may have less than 10 years to save our economy. To me that was a comfort! We are in uncharted territory.

I’m going to offer links that you should look at but consider this. First of all our social programs like social security that are now in the red have been handled in such a way that any organization other than the US government would have had their entire management team in jail over it. The social security lock box is full of worthless treasury IOUs. When it started it was something like 6 paying in for every one collecting. Factors of age and birth rate mean that now we have a 2 to 1 ration. Do the math. How much better would it have been to allow us to have saved that money with interest? I don’t expect in 20 years I will see a dime.

Again I digress. As we have lost millions of jobs in the private sector there has been an explosion of public sector jobs as well has pay raises greatly exceeding anything possible in the real world. Collective bargaining means unions encounter a government that not only doesn’t have to control costs to make a profit, but loves the union dues paying for their re-elections. Again, digressing a little. Here’s my point…

In war time we expect to spend more of our Gross Domestic Product, that is the total wealth produced by our country. In peace time we need to pay that down. In any case we need to grow GDP to pay for what we borrowed in bad times. FDR was considered in his day a big spender with the new deal. He spent 10%-12% of GDP. During WWI we spent 25% conducting two wars. Today we are passing 20% headed for 25%. On the horizon a few decades at this pace is 40%. We also have so much debt already that we are spending roughly 25% of our tax revenue on interest… and we are borrowing 40% of the money we plan to spend every year.

You don’t have to be an economics wiz to get this. Actually if you are an economist from some ivy league university you might have the sophistry to try to rationalize this based on quasi-religious believe in demonstrably failed ideas of Keynesian economics. Just in case you don’t get it let me explain. There is only so much money in the world to borrow. China is getting wary while holding $800B of our debt and the only reason the dollar is performing now is much of Europe is in even worse shape… so it’s a good thing for us our President wants us to follow their lead and stop being a bunch of cowboys. Sorry, had to throw that in. I don’t want to follow the financial model of Greece

Right now our treasury and Federal Reserve bank are manipulating money. They are, as best as we can tell since they cannot be audited, printing money to buy debt. It’s really a slight of hand to see what they are doing as they cannot directly print the money, but at the same time the money isn’t there unless it is printed. Remember supply and demand? Inflation is not caused by prices going up. That’s the result. The cause is inflating the monetary supply. When the government borrows a trillion dollars for pork after the trillion we spent on banks… Well that money is no longer in the private sector, and to prop the private sector up the Fed needs to print money, which they have. The Fed saved us, not the stimulus which actually hurt. You see banks don’t want to lend when money is tight, and besides the most desirable client to lend to is the US government who happens to need a lot of money. Beating banks about the ears and shuffling borrowed money is a pretty delusional answer if you think about it.

Is this making sense? I know I’m drifting into details here. Let me spell it out. There is no big explosive recovery in the works. For that you need to cut taxes on business and business owners instead of sapping their cash out of the system and turning job creators upside down and shaking the cash out of their pockets like they were a piggy bank. There is no end in sight to the spending. War or no war entitlement spending is sinking us fastest of all and growing government is taking a huge bite. Eventually we will not be able to maintain our credit rating and it wouldn’t matter because there won’t be anyone who wants to loan us money.

I need to make a brief aside here over taxes and debt. What causes debt? There is an old saying, “if your income doesn’t exceed your outgo your upkeep will be your downfall”. Debt is spending more than you make. I make this point because when Ronald Reagan cut taxes the revenues to the treasury over 10 years doubled and we created 21 million new jobs. Critics point to the fact that debt went up and say it was a failure. Uh huh? What about spending? Well congress holds the purse and spending outpaced revenue just like it’s doing today which is why we have debut. The result of tax policy is not always intuitive. Art Laffer developed a formula to determine optimum revenue tax curves called the Laffer Curve. If you want to learn about it watch this video.

How do you know you are financially sunk? I would say that when you individually owe most of what you expect to make in a lifetime and all your income has to go to pay the interest on your debt that you are screwed. That means you can’t pay any bills because every cent goes to interest on your debt. It is an impossible financial circumstance… and it is where our country is headed. You don’t usually reach that utter disaster before confidence collapses. Once your lenders lose confidence the money flow stops. The party is over.

Here’s what you should ask yourself. Are we really beyond failure just because? I’m sure a great many Romans thought that just as the British thought they would always be the world’s greatest super power, as did the Spanish. If we accept our own mortality as a possibility then the question is when and how could we meet our demise. Here are some links. First a look at the recent debt we have accumulated. Next is a delightful proposal for dealing with the size of government. Finally I found a great deal of optimism in Paul Ryan’s road map for America’s future.

In my opinion the difference between a wonderful century and the horrible end to a civilization that respects human rights is all based upon what we as a nation decide to do over the next few years. If you agree then we can forget the D or the R by the name and look at the A for American. We must turn back our government from taking us across the Rubicon where our freedom and greatness becomes an historical footnote. One thing is certain. If we leave this president and this congress to keep doing what they are trying to do for seven more years we will be fundamentally transformed in a way we will come to deeply regret.

I keep telling people I will post something on climate change, excuse me, global warming. Okay, if you are still back in the 90s they called it global warming, or Anthropogenic Global Warming, which is a fancy way of pointing from your private jet and saying “he did it”. However some time back as it became clear that the climate was cooling they decided to call it climate change. The beauty of that is no matter what happens you blame it on humans and then ask for global government and wealth transfers to right the wrongs of climate.

From the onset several things strike me. If we are affecting climate how come we can’t affect a hurricane or even agree if seeding clouds really worked. In fact rain making is as close as we might get, but only if the right clouds are there. When prognosticators tell us what the next century will bring why can’t they predict the weather more than a week or two out. It looks to me like climate predictions are best done by statisticians. The farmers almanac may be a better start. Climate modelers meet annually to compare their one year model and in years of attempts none of them has even gotten close once. You’d think that would damp their confidence prognosticating, but then those research grants don’t jump ten fold with sunshine and lollipops.

After enough indoctrination from the Discovery channel which has practically ruined my love of science with their incessant condescending warnings about my consumption turning the planet into a smoldering gasbag I started to believe it. Then in 2008 when we had the coldest spring since 1918 I started doing research to see if I could figure out what was going on. I do farm you know. I locked myself in my office for two weeks only coming out to eat and mutter. By the end I was furious! I started going to through pages and pages of scientific documentation apparently designed to make your eyes glass over and just agree that these people were smarter than you so you would have to trust them. The problem was I began to get the feeling the entire argument was that these people were sure they were smarter than me and the way they won was getting me to feel stupid and give in. Just one problem… Being arrogant and educated doesn’t make them smarter than me.

I like to operate by axioms. I have learned to navigate the complex by identifying the core points. It’s like looking at lots of points of data where it means nothing, then taking a mean average and spotting the trend. There is an old saying that genius is making the complicated simple. Being a genius I arrived at a corollary that irritates me… Who made it complicated in the first place? If in an entire movement there is nobody who can define the basic relationships so smart people can understand then it had better be as amazing as advanced quantum physics. If an argument can be made so convoluted others can’t follow it and the person advocating can assume the mantle of being really smart and ready to save them from disaster I guess they can ask for you wallet or tell you to get naked. I just don’t like being manipulated, unless I’m getting drinks and dancing out of it.

So I was going to argue the technical points and I was going to start out with just how extreme reality is. For instance how much CO2 is in the air and how much air is over the planet. How much CO2 does man produce, what is the irradiative bandwidth and what temperature must it reach to heat a vastly larger mass. Even more amazing, why does the greenhouse theory operate on the assumption of thermal energy increasing at lower altitudes based on theoretical (and disproved) higher temperatures at some mystical theoretical boundary layer? In fact why is this observed temperature difference at altitude there and why is it simply an assumption in a theory that rationalizes violating several laws of physics? These questions and answers will not only blow your mind, but they will make it clear that if the same scientific thinking were applied in other areas we’d be lucky to have a sundial.

There is of course more. The entire alarm is based on what these scientists suppose would happen if these absurd violations of physics were true. Rather than looking at paleo-climate data which suggests that prior to the ice ages the planet was a tropical paradise they speculate heat leads to disaster. Interestingly the Sahara desert is instructive here. Scientists estimate 10,000 years ago the earth shifted up 1 degree which shortened the day slightly. The Sahara was rain forest but with less daylight to photosynthesize there was less condensation and the water cycle slowly failed. Note that Panama is not a desert. I could go on but the most fantastic assumption is that if man does it then it breaks nature, where as it works fine if nature does it. Insert a new conditional factor into all physics equations for man caused or not.

However there really is no longer any need to make people’s eyes glaze over. Trust me, global warming is over. Okay, don’t trust me. Let me give you the information to verify. First of all let’s start with three simple ideas. The first idea is that you don’t stand up in a crowded theater and yell fire then insist others prove you wrong. Liberal guilt be damned! How arrogant do I have to be to think my puny fart just killed a polar bear? Prove it. The second premise is that if you have the goods you will deliver your smoking gun proof. Further more you would never in a million years give up the moral high ground just for giggles. Finally if you assert there is something wrong with the climate then what pray tell is the correct baseline we have deviated from, assuming there is any indication we caused it. The initial assumption was no change which is insane. Now we acknowledge climate changes but this is absurd to arrive here before establishing basic patterns. Pardon me for saying, what kind of moron thinks that the climate has never changed for how long?

We are not having any measurable effect outside of urban heat islands. So it’s warmer in the city on a sunny day, but other than that nada. The reason I can say this is because we now know they don’t have the goods. If you still believe that smarter people than you put this forward and even if there are some doubts they must have known something then think again. Take an hour or two and look into it for yourself. Don’t just read some talking head protecting his job and millions of dollars in grant money. Think. Things started to turn dramatically when one of three main sources for the UN IPCC was exposed. Let’s not get wrapped up in whether the court of public opinion should dismiss the atrocities exposed in the emails from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit. What is important is that nobody denies their authenticity. Dr Phil Jones who headed up the CRU stepped down for the investigation. The UK has found they violated their Freedom Of Information Act, but as it took over six months since the last request no charges will be pressed.

Al Gore used the hockey stick graph very convincingly. It was what fooled me into believing him for a time. It was a FRAUD! It was particularly interesting when a couple guys from Canada exposed it and there were even congressional hearings. I read thousands of words as the chart was meticulously proven to be plain and simple fraud. In fact it’s rarely mentioned that in Al Gore’s movie part of the line was a projection that hadn’t been updated for years, thus appearing to be real data! In the UK they took Al Gore’s movie to court and now schools are required to tell students about 9 errors. The man who brought the case lists 38 errors on his web site, but didn’t want the trial to drag on forever. Al Gore has not debated for years.

Things really fell apart at the climate conference in 2009. Talk about relief! In 2008 the term “global governance” was being dropped suggesting national sovereignty needed to be ceded to the UN to resolve this issue. It wasn’t just the huge snow storm and the arguments over how much money rich countries would give small countries or how the head of the IPCC was set to become one of the richest men in the world from his green investments. it was the beginning of the unraveling of the 2007 IPCC report. People like to imagine this is a group of scientists, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a political group as many scientists formerly associated with it will tell you.

First it came out that the dire warning that the glaciers in the Himalayas were not actually going to be gone in 35 years. Turns out that was somebody speculating in a magazine article. Worse yet the IPCC head knew before the conference and dismissed it. Next we found out the climate change wiping out the Amazon rain forest was bogus, but then anyone who knew science would understand that more photosynthesis and warmth is going to do the opposite. Next we found out they lied about deserts in Africa. Then we found out that it seems every part of the report under scrutiny was being done by advocates, students and the World Wildlife Federation… who by the way will get a lot more money out of you if the planet and those poor over crowded polar bears need help.

Here’s a great note. The current head of the IPCC has been asked to step down by no less than the head of Greenpeace in the UK. However India has taken a different course as they had been investing to find a solution for losing the water from the Himalayas. They are pulling out of the IPCC as they say it is a political body and can’t be trusted. Oh, did I mention the current head of the IPCC is from India? Russia and China have both said the CRU in the UK modified the data they sent them. Oh, did I mention that the CRU “climategate” emails had Phil Jones saying he would destroy the original data before giving it over. Recently the CRU said they somehow lost 100 years of climate data… conveniently…

If you don’t believe that man is causing the planet to heat up and cook all the little baby animals who deserve to live so much more than us for doing this evil you are called names. At the top of the list is denier, as in holocaust denier. Al Gore refuses to debate any of a number of challenges, and I am as bad as denying the Nazis killed six million Jews? Worse yet the watermelon saying that could be wearing a Che T-Shirt unaware he personally murdered thousands, but I digress. The other name is “flat earther”. Michael Mann produced the now discredited hockey stick graph which wiped out the little ice age that was in the prior IPCC report. The assumption was that climate was static until the industrial age. The assumption is that the greenhouse theory posited in 1824, which is technically disproved by various measurements, has this mysterious downward energy transfer… to me these are a lot closer to flat earth thinking.

The bottom line is simple. It doesn’t matter if I can go toe to toe with your science guy or not. It doesn’t matter you can. No smart and sane person is going to utterly destroy their credibility, call people names and make up lies while asking for trillions of dollars and control of our lives… unless of course they think you are all too freaking stupid and sheep like and they think it will be funny to really push the envelope on how deep they can pile the BS because they believe you will never see through it to the truth. Come to think of it… if you are still calling me a denier they could be right about you. However I’d like to give you a lot more credit.

Go dig around yourself. Tell your friends. Our president wants a clean energy bill. That’s code speak for regulating carbon and selling authorization to emit… which is going to make anything that consumes energy cost more… which is everything. The UK pays an extra $3,600 a year per household for this. I’ll tell you what I think needs saving. The planet is fine, it’s us who need saving and it’s greedy cronies of Al Gore and the Washington elite we need saving from. In fairness that means most of one political party and a lot of the other.

Climate change hysteria doesn’t deserve deep thought, it deserves to be treated like the comical thing it is. And so I let the late George Carlin close with his thoughts on saving the planet.

Ever since i started this blog I’ve been trying to say something. Time after time I write something and don’t post it, which is really not why I started this. The problem is that I am at once counter culture and traditional. I had my wild years. That party is long past the statute of limitations. I also served my country in the Navy where frankly I thought we were pretty disorganized. Years later I found myself in Amway at a meeting where people cheered me for serving my country. It was weird. I was in right after Veit Nam. It wasn’t like coming home from WW II where you were a hero. In fact that point in our history was interesting. Whatever your views the communists there had a strategically brilliant idea. If they could turn the mood of a democratic country they could win. As I say it was brilliant because older people assumed the government was always right, younger people didn’t understand why we were there and then we micro managed the war with an utterly stupid premise that the enemy cared about death tolls.

I bring this up because the most remarkable thing about the Viet Nam war is that the protest mechanism and mind set was outside the control of our enemies. Decades later and much as Japan and Germany are no longer enemies neither is Viet Nam. However the strategy they set loose is still in motion. You can see the mindset in Oliver Stone movies. While it was Kennedy and Johnson who got us in it was Nixon we love to hate.

When I was 17 I remember thinking capitalism was evil. My folks decided to get me a book on communes in America. That was nice of them. The problem was as I read through it about some 200 communes over hundreds of years I noticed something. They all failed. I asked my folks why they got a book about the failures and where the successes were. I remember that Reagan predicted the fall of the USSR to within a few months some 10 years earlier. After Ted Kennedy died I read about the Russians finding a letter from Kennedy trying to get Andropov to help him run against Reagan for president. Kennedy thought Reagan was dangerous. Right. I thought the Reagan presidency would be a disaster, but only because I got my news from Saturday Night Live. I was forced to admit the obvious and anyone who lived through the Carter years knows what I’m saying. The 80s is called the decade of greed because how else do you disparage prosperity.

In recent years I see a lot of people wearing T-Shirts with the image of Che Guevara. I usually think they must like the image and not know who he is. I mean if you don’t know that he was a rich kid turned mercenary who got bored in Cuba and wanted to overthrow some more governments then it’s a great image. When I read years after the fact about him being executed I figured he had it coming. You go to some other country and try and wage war, kill people and overthrow the government and you should not expect to be treated like a diplomat. The problem I have lately is I wonder if maybe people wearing those shirts do know who he is.

Just in case you are not versed I’ll explain the understanding of capitalism I had instilled in me. Capitalism for me means that I enter the market to compete. In order to achieve a reward I have to offer a product or service that has a perceived value in line with what I’m charging. Usually this keeps prices low, but in the case of our products the market has a collective myopia offering me a niche market. We compete with price secondary to quality to offer a value proposition. Regardless it is the market that will validate our vision. My incentive is to succeed by making the optimal price and value decisions. While it’s more complex in practice the principle is that I can only thrive by satisfying customer demand.

Communism fails for the simple reason that humans demand leadership or ruthless types simply fill the void. So communism always because a ruling class and a peasant class. The fundamental difference between the natural law rights of the US and of a Marxist group is that we believe in an equal opportunity to produce an unequal result while the Marxist and social justice crowd believes we have an unequal opportunity to produce an equal result. The equal result is the crux of the problem, because it is impossible to elevate an entire population to the pinnacle of success, but we can all arrive at the depths of despair and poverty… except of course for the ruling class.

However the bridge between capitalism and communism is socialism. In fact once your commune stratifies a ruling class it by definition becomes socialism rather than communism. Karl Marx expressed communism as “To each according to his need from each according to his ability”. It really sounds nice, doesn’t it. Unfortunately it fails to recognize the most basic of human aspects, motivation. Motivation begins with fear of loss, moves to hope for gain and ultimately has the level few find of pure attitude driven purpose. One must develop a habit on each level to reach the next. Therein lies the problem. Without a fear of loss or hope for gain there is no motivation to struggle. Life and especially any worthy enterprise is struggle.

So where do you stand? Many people often thank us for what we do. I find it difficult to imagine there are many socialists shopping with us. Yet I know there are a lot in Oregon who are looking to the government to offer solutions. In fact from the time we leave our parents how many of us are ready to take the unnerving walk to the front of the crowd and take full responsibility for our financial future? To fully participate in free enterprise capitalism you have to take great risks. Not many do. Not many see the fact that in many ways this is not such a capitalist society. Our tax code punishes success and rewards failure, but does so under the guise of compassion. Much of the former Soviet empire now has a 10% flat tax. Imagine that.

Many countries now have adopted ideas from us. While our social security is only a few years from insolvency a number of countries moved to private and solvent solutions decades ago. I recently saw someone make the example that because Lasik eye surgery was always paid out of pocket prices were going down. I’m sure there are many factors but the one thing I am confident of is this. Since the United States was founded very nearly every country in the world has followed our grand experiment and adopted self governance and some degree of capitalist free markets. No other economic idea has been as viral or as successful. At the same time the Soviet Union fell, China has been totally infected by Hong Kong and every free country implementing socialist ideas has had serious troubles with the solvency of those problems.

As long as we continue to believe in freedom and free enterprise capitalism we can pass on a better world to our children. If we are seduced by Marxism then the greatest country on earth would be suffering the ultimate irony of following the USSR into the dustbin of history.