Pool Boy

Your family makes $140,000.  You pay your pool boy $24,000 but he spends $38,000.  He is $130,000 in debt and he tells lenders you are good for it.  Now do you get the Tea Party?    

If you remember who works for whom and where the money comes from in the first place, it is pretty easy to see why people are hacked off.  Add eight zeros to the pool boy’s numbers and you have the budget of the federal government.  

The government works for us; the pool boy is not family. We pay him $2.4 trillion in taxes to keep up the house and grounds so we can go to work.  His job description is the Constitution; it tells him what he can and can’t to do out in the yard and it warns him to stay out of the house in about 10 different places.

We Americans produce about $14 trillion of goods and services each year - that is our national GDP.  Wealth is like food, somebody has to make the stuff so the rest of us can eat.  That is what the private sector does – we make all the money that everybody spends.  It’s our money; it does not belong to the pool boy.

The pool boy tries to hide his desperate financial straits by stating his deficits and debt as a percentage of our GDP.  When he says he is running a deficit of 9% of our GDP it doesn’t sound as asinine as overspending his own revenues by 78%.  The pool boy’s debt is 541% of his own income; he would prefer to say 90% of our GDP.  That sounds asinine no matter how you say it.

Most of us would cut back on our spending; not the pool boy.  He formed his own union many years ago, so now he negotiates with himself.  No surprise he has secured better wages, benefits, pensions, and tenure.  The average federal government worker now makes $119,000 - more than twice the private sector average – and they get to watch porn all day without getting fired.      

Why are people angry?  Our pool boy costs too much, he steals our kid’s money, he lies to us, and he doesn’t do squat. That's why.    

This is not about race, religion, party affiliation, or repealing 50 year-old laws. It is about the looting of America by public unions, special interests, corporate welfare queens, warmongers, socialists, tax cheats, banksters, and every other species of ungrateful civic parasite who thinks self-government means they get to write checks to themselves.    

I frankly don’t understand people who are not angry. And I feel sorry for well-meaning liberals who put their faith in the pool boy; they are forced to choose each day between denial and heartbreak as a government too big NOT to fail puts its reliable incompetence on full display.  Even James Carville has had enough.     

Want to know why people are terrified watching the oil spew out of the ocean floor for the 42^nd day in a row?  Because we know that someday that will be a blown heart valve or an ulcerated colon, and it won’t be pelicans dying while the government dithers.   

Want to know why people are having second thoughts about giving our entire health care system over to an advisory commission appointed by the President?  Because we just learned that the only qualification for this sort of job is to not run against some fossilized incumbent hack in a primary. 

Libertarians have never trusted the pool boy.  We don’t care if he’s holding the skimming net in his left hand or his right; the only difference between a leftie and rightie is what he would take away first after he breaks into the house.  People used to think we were nuts to worry; not so much anymore.   

Anger need not turn to panic.  We elect a new bunch of pool boys every two years, and we can send folks to Washington who will scoop out the turds, skim off the scum, change the filters, and restart the circulating pumps.   

It won’t take long and the pool will be clean and clear again, but only if we stay angry all the way to November. 

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.

Compassion

The dividing line between compassion and tyranny has a name: it is called coercion.  It is the border that encircles libertarian geography on the political map.    

Few would argue with our bedrock libertarian principle: it is unjust to initiate force or fraud against another person.  Don’t you agree? 

And yet we force people to join unions, force people to pay arbitrary prices for goods, services, and labor, force people to purchase insurance, force people to fund activities and organizations and activities they find immoral, force people to give up their property, force people to surrender their income, force people to lend money to others, force people to attend a particular school. 

We do all this (and more) in the name of compassion; that is a distortion of the term’s meaning. Compassion is when 95% of us tend to the truly needy 5% on our own volition; tyranny is forcing 5% to provide unearned benefits to the 95%.  

Compassion is giving poor parents the same school choice that rich parents have; tyranny is forcing Milwaukee kids to attend public schools where only 6% will be taught to read proficiently and painters make over $100,000.         

60% of Americans now get more income from government than they give to it; that number will raise to over 70% when the new health care bill kicks in.  This is not a safety net; it is an ATM where 3 of us deposit and 7 withdraw.        

We use State force to compel, and we also use State force to prohibit: from eating certain foods, engaging in certain behaviors, traveling to certain places, buying certain products, engaging in certain forms of commerce  - the list is too numerous to recite.  We have eight times the incarceration rate of other developed countries - such is our preoccupation with enacting prohibitions and punishing each other.

Tearing families apart over victimless crimes is not compassionate. And if society itself can be a victim, then why is adultery not a class A felony?  Can you think of anything which has destroyed more families, plunged more people into poverty, or inflicted more emotional trauma?           

Libertarians believe that all voluntary exchange is just, and that any initiation of coercive force is unjust.  That is where we part company with liberals on the social issues, often drawing criticism for a presumed lack of compassion.

The dividing line is clear:  I have a right to form a union; no right to force you to join it.  I have a right to health care; no right to force you to buy it for me. I have a right to choose my own lifestyle; no right to force you to subsidize it.

Liberals would never think of stealing your money themselves; but they have no qualms about employing the State to do the job. I doubt they would break into your house and snoop through your private files and records, but they set the State onto that task regularly.

If you employ a person to initiate force on your behalf, your prison sentence will be called justice and you will be called an accomplice.  But if you employ the State to employ a person to initiate force on your behalf, then it will be called social justice and you will be called a progressive.

Libertarians prefer to use terms for their intended meanings.  We do not consider initiation of force to be progress; we do not consider deprivation of liberty to be justice. 

Liberals mistake and even misrepresent any libertarian objections to the means of achieving a goal as disagreement with the goal itself – Rand Paul is the latest victim of the grindhouse.  The lesson to be learned is that a Constitutionalist should not engage in debate with a Frivolist. 

Besides, the CRA makes the libertarian’s case, not the liberal’s. Half a century of State coercion has not cured racial disparity, just as State coercion has not eliminated income disparity, poverty, crime, violence, corruption, or drug use, and has not improved educational performance, economic competitiveness, domestic security, or a whole list of things that matter to all of us.  

The things that we all value most - health, prosperity, opportunity, family, friends, love, happiness, freedom, pride, accomplishment, career, beauty, education, faith, security, material abundance, creative expression, community – are not things that can be compelled to materialize, and they are non-transferable.   

Each of us defines them for ourselves, attains them individually, and decides for ourselves when we have accumulated enough of them. They can not be given to you by the coercive power of the State; they can only be taken.  

That is why the line between compassion and tyranny must be drawn with a sharp pen; and why it must never be crossed.

Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.

Arrested Development

The Civil Rights Act of 1964?  Why do we have to reopen that debate because of something one guy didn’t say on a program no one watched? 

And wasn’t the name of their website MoveOn?  Whatever happened to that idea?

We are now in the fourth year of Democratic control in Congress, and they are still whining about GWB instead of doing the job we pay them for. 

It has been thirty years since Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts were proposed, and I am still reading about how the current deficit and debt crises we face are his fault. 

It has been forty-six years since the Civil Rights Act was passed and now we have to spend all summer listening to a bunch of liberal racists-in-remission scold the rest of us who never had their disease.

The economy still sucks, the market is taking a dump, unemployment is going up, Europe is imploding, we are stuck in two wars without identifiable victory strategies, and we are going to take the summer off to play dress-up with civil-rights-Barbie?     

I have a theory for why the left is obsessed with the conflicts of their childhood – particularly race.  I blame Dr. Spock. 

Before he convinced our parents not to spank, parents corrected their children.  You made a mistake, you got a love tap, and you – listen up, lefties – MOVED ON.  You quit doing naughty things and went back outside to play with your friends.  

After Spock, you got to sit by yourself and contemplate your guilt and shame during your time out, confused about what you did wrong, and building up rage against the happy kids that were back playing outside.  There was no closure, so you obsessed about those naughty things, convincing yourself that everyone is bad and needs to be fixed.

So that’s my theory of where liberal whackjobs come from – they obsess about their own past sins and insist that we join them in the corner for a perpetual national timeout. 

Further evidence to support the unified theory of psycho-political arrested development: what could possibly explain a standing ovation for the President of Mexico ripping on us in our own House?  Fond memories of spring break in Cancun. 

Ok, equal time:  far-right wingnuts were probably beaten as kids – they act out their mother-loathing by invading defenseless countries, wire-tapping, throwing people in jail, and selling derivatives.  

The majority of Americans are the happy kids that just want to play outside – Libertarians certainly are down with that.  We are the party of playing outside.   

We happy kids are adults now; when we mess up, we take our spanking, quit doing naughty things, and we – listen up again, lefties - MOVE ON.  We are sick and tired of taking orders from you beaten kids and you fixated neurotic kids who can’t get the hang of it.  

Go fix yourself.  Get a grip.  Get some help.  Pull your head out.  Go to church if you want forgiveness.  Start a 12-step, and then add step #13: leave us alone. 

It’s just a theory.

Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.

   

Tuesday's Primary Elections

Arlen Specter lost, and Rand Paul won – that is not just big, it’s Joe Biden big.

You could not find two better poster-kids than Mr. Specter and Dr. Paul for what is wrong with this country and what might save it, respectively.   

Specter served in the Senate for 24 years, while this is Paul’s first crack at public office.  Specter is a regular on the Sunday talk shows, while Paul couldn’t buy his way on.  Specter ran on ObamaCare; Paul practices actual health care. Specter is an eager Party switcher, Paul hardly mentions Party.

Specter picked a fight with the tea party movement; Paul is the darling of tea partiers across the nation.  Specter has only one principle – Arlen Specter – while Paul is a man of principled libertarian beliefs. Specter had President Obama’s endorsement; Paul fought against the endorsements of the GOP establishment.   

Specter is the latest casualty of the anti-establishment trend that has been building over the past year in special elections, primaries, and local contests. Rand is the latest to surf the wave.  Libertarians love the guy; his reach transcends party labels.     

The new winning formula: a principled libertarian-minded outsider candidate backed by Tea Partiers, libertarians, constitutionalists, fiscal conservatives, federalists, anti-militarists, small business owners, taxpayers, Fed-enders, school-choicers, gun-righters, first-time-activists, and rank and file workers across the spectrum.

And the new losing formula: unprincipled incumbent lifer, vote-whore, RepubloCrat Party hack, backed by special interests, big business, union bosses, party establishment, ventriloquist dummy media, bankers, and the whole of the entitlement industry, both personal and corporate.

This nation is being divided up into two camps, choose your own labels: producers and dependents, taxpayers and tax-eaters, the looters and the looted. Individual liberty has been sacrificed to create group favors, and economic liberty has been plundered to fund wealth re-distribution schemes.  

Carving the nation up into givers and takers has been done with the sharp knives of race, class, religion, gender, orientation, generation, eco-morality, indebtedness, Party affiliation – any means necessary to manufacture victims from whole cloth and to smear opponents as racist, greedy, ignorant, or fascist.    

The purveyors of division assumed that the looters would reward them with votes of gratitude into perpetuity, while the looted would remain complacent forever.  Wrong on both counts: looters feel no sense of gratitude, and the looted get angry. 

Tuesday’s vote was an angry vote; anger directed squarely at those who have set themselves above the laws they pass, the people they represent, and the Constitution they swore an oath to uphold.

Liberty lovers everywhere celebrate the victory of Rand Paul and the rejection of Arlen Specter.  Together, they tell us it is not too late to take our country back.

Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.

None Of Your Business

President Obama is right: at some point you have made enough money, and  that point is called: it's-none-of-your-damn-business.

It’s nobody's business how much money you make, how much you spend, what you spend it on, how much you save, how much you invest, what you invest in, how much you profit, how much you give away, and who you give it to.

It's your money, that's why.

And while we are at it, it's nobody's business what you eat, drink, smoke, drive, wear, buy, sell, grow, read, watch, shoot, carry, study, listen to, pray with, heat with, or sleep with, either.

It's your life, that's why.

These are the truths that our Declaration of Independence described as self-evident.  This is not the United States of Mommy; you don’t have to explain yourself to anyone except your spouse and your God.  Certainly not to the government, the Congress, or the President, who all work for you.    

Most of us would not dare talk to the boss the way our civil servants - key word servants - talk to us.  And a good boss corrects his young and inexperienced employees when they don’t seem to grasp the principles of the firm.  Listen up.   

At some point, Mr. President, you have taken enough money; why don't you go stim on that for a while?

And at some point, Mr. President, you have spent enough money; in 2010 we will have passed that point by $1.4 trillion.

And at some point, Mr. President, you have borrowed enough money; how about you just do your job from now on, and quit trying to tell us how to do ours?

In fact, Mr. President, we just think that at some point, you folks have served enough days as our elected representatives. 

Because, Mr. President, you had it pretty close to right. There is a point where we indeed have had enough of some things, but money is not one of them.

We've had enough taxes, enough spending, enough debt, enough regulation, enough bailouts, enough unemployment, enough political correctness, enough nationalizing of industries, enough war, enough energy rationing, enough lies, enough snooping, and enough disregard for the Constitution.

The American Dream is not about owning, it is about earning. We are a nation of possibilities, not a nation of limits.  We will earn as much or as little as we want, and we will make those decisions for ourselves, thank you very much. 

A government that can decide when you have earned enough money can also decide when you have spent enough – on health care, education, energy, charities it does not like, opposition political parties, cars, houses, recreation, guns, and all manner of things that are the pursuit of happiness one day, felonies the next.

In America, we the people place limits on the government, not the other way around.  It is our trust in liberty that makes us exceptional in the world; or did, before we elected people who were either afraid or ashamed to be exceptional.

Libertarians are not afraid of Liberty, nor are we ashamed of the prosperity, charity, and happiness it brings out in those lucky enough to live under its immunity. 

And Mr. President, there is no point where you have too much Liberty.           

Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.

Greek To Me

Anyone who still thinks our country is headed in the right direction should pause and observe the destination which awaits us at the end of our journey - Greece.

In case you don’t follow such things, the nation of Greece has gone belly up; it committed economic suicide with too many years of too much government, too much debt, and too much deficit spending – deficits it used to add government jobs, expand welfare entitlements, subsidize national industries, and empower unions.  Hope and Change 101.

We are fond of saying that economics is “all Greek to me”, but that is only because we let economists explain it.  What happened in Greece is that their 30-year socialist bender is over and now it’s hangover time.  My father used to say that no one ever has a bad time going broke; it’s when you get there that it hurts.  We are going broke, and Greece is already there – that’s the difference.   

The annual budget deficit in Greece is 12% of GDP; ours is at 11% and climbing.  Their public debt is 125% of GDP; ours is over 90% and climbing.  More people work for the government in Greece than make things; same here.  As economist John Welch put it, Greece is a few chapters ahead of us in the same book.  We should read ahead and see how this particular work of economic fiction ends.   

The consequences of the coming default for the Greek people are already quite severe; short term interest rates have shot above 20%, unemployment is over 11%, credit has dried up, foreign investment has stopped, strikes by public unions have turned to violent riots, and the Euro is losing value by the day - some experts fear up to 50% devaluation in the near future.  

And Greece is not alone; Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Italy, even Great Britain are close on the heels of default.  The price tag for bailing out Greece is $150 billion; saving the rest of Europe from itself will be somewhere north of a trillion – so much for the grand ambitions of the European world-government, universal-currency crowd.    

Incredibly, while the socialist states of Europe are collapsing right before our eyes, our leaders in Washington remain obsessed with creating a European-style welfare state here - public health care, central banks, nationalized industries, regulated profits, VAT tax, subsidies galore, steeply progressive tax policy, cap and trade, unions.  Is there a more compelling argument for mandatory workplace drug testing?

Our national sanity check will come in the primaries and the general elections this November, when we will either vote to stay on our present course towards insolvency or vote to save ourselves before it is too late.  There is an alternative to interventionist economic suicide – free enterprise.       

Prosperity and freedom are inseparable, just as poverty and tyranny are inseparable.  What do boat people and investment capital have in common?  They both travel in the same direction – away from poverty and tyranny and towards freedom and prosperity.  A system which strives for equality of outcome inevitably makes everyone equally miserable, as the Greeks are now painfully discovering for themselves.             

Socialists in country after country have deluded themselves for 150 years that they could stand on the slippery slope and sustain the unsustainable. Their arrogance convinced them they could defy the laws of economics, the truths of human nature, and the principles of human action.  Our American socialists think they can re-write the laws of economics, too; but they are wrong, and we simply can’t wait around for them to prove it to themselves.  They need to be stopped now.   

We already know what works better.  Free market capitalism - right out of the box, unrepentant, unshackled, pure vanilla American-style free enterprise, warts and all.  It’s better to be unequally rich than equally poor, and there isn’t enough money in the world to bail us out when it’s our turn to follow Greece into the abyss.         

Capitalism is not perfect; rather it is less imperfect than any other economic system devised over thousands of years of human history.  Free market capitalism is the only system compatible with individual rights and personal liberty; that is why it works, and why socialism can't.   

Prosperity is a gift from Liberty, and Liberty is the absence of government.  We can have more government or more liberty, but only one can give us more prosperity.

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.

The Problem With Government

The problem with government is that there is too much of it; we resent how much we must pay for it, and we resent even more how much attention we must pay to it.

 

Most of us would rather spend our money, time, and energy on work, family, friends, church, hobbies, entertainment, education, homes, sports, communities, and about 100 other things that are higher up on our priority list.  But government has become too big to avoid – it is inescapable.  

Not only is government intervening into every little nook and cranny of our lives, but that involvement is intensely politicized – the mandates, permissions, subsidies, and penalties that government attaches to daily living are driven by ideology, and justified (or opposed) by spin, half-truths, wild exaggerations, and outright lies.

It is exhausting just to weed through all that crap to form an independent opinion on any particular issue.  Facts are hard to come by once our elected officials and media pundits start posturing, posing, and screaming hysterically about bills they have not read, proposals that haven’t been written, and ideas they can’t comprehend.    

Government was not meant to be exhausting.  It was meant to be… there.  Like elevator music, or white noise, or the other four guys in the Dave Clark Five.   We-the-people are supposed to be Oprah and the government is supposed to be Steadman, not the other way around.    

The Founding Fathers decided on a federal government of limited, enumerated, and carefully balanced powers.  Their challenges were far worse than ours – health care, elderly care, poverty, unemployment, border security, education, energy, ethnic tensions, religious expression – but they understood that government causes more problems than it cures.  History has proven them to be right.   

The whole idea of limited government is for us to live our lives free from the politicians’ constant demands to be the center of our attention every single day.  When we speak of freedom and independence, we mean freedom from government and independence from government.  Liberty is the absence of government in choice.  The less relevant government is, the more relevant you become.

And when we do pay attention to government – kicking and screaming - we don’t like what we see; like SEC regulators watching porn while the banksters rob us blind. Or that the average federal government employee makes $119,000 per year – double the average of the private sector.  Or that the total number of all government employees (22 million) now exceeds the number of people who make things in this country – manufacturing, agriculture, mining, and construction combined.    

There’s your problem with government: too much jockey, not enough horse.

It doesn’t matter whether the jockey is holding the whip in his Left hand or his Right; the problem is that he weighs over 600 pounds – that is the ratio of government spending in our $1.4 trillion thoroughbred economy.  And we wonder why we are losing the race for global competitiveness.   

Each new tax is one less bag of oats for the starving racehorse and another batch of oatmeal cookies down the gaping pie hole of the bloated government jockey.  Each new regulation is another bucket of water taken from the thirsty steed to satisfy the hulking mass of sweaty satin that is breaking the back of our nation.  

The solution for the problem of too much government is not complicated: feed the horse and starve the jockey.  Repeal regulations, reduce spending, reduce taxes, reduce borrowing, and de-criminalize free will.  It is not enough to simply change from one fat jockey to the fat jockey of the other party every few years; we must cut the government down to size before we can claim once again to be a free people.   

You were not put on this earth to pull another man’s plow; you were born to run.  To run free and proud, as fast and as far as your talent, ambition, character, choices, associations, and good fortune will take you.  Liberty is the wind in your face; government can only offer you the collective dull plodding of the 40 horse team. 

Only the wild stallions run free; the plow horse must be broken before it will submit to the yoke.  Do not submit.  Throw off the yoke.  Reclaim your Liberty.     

“Moment of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.