Our Independence Day

It is a uniquely American holiday, this upcoming Independence Day; it is the day we commemorate the abolishment of our government.             

This nation did not materialize from the vapor one day in 1776.  There was nearly 200 years of colonial life, and there was government for all of that time.  We did not create a new government on that Fourth of July; we just dissolved the old one.  

The national holiday which commemorates our disposal of unwanted government is properly called Independence Day.  It does not commemorate independence from our parents, from want, from ignorance, from addiction, or from a relationship gone sour; it is a celebration of our independence from government. 

How appropriate that our Independence Day celebrations include illegal fireworks, noise violations, public overindulgence, teeth-rattling Harleys with helmetless riders, music blasting at annoying decibels, wake-roiling boat parades, broken curfews, and all manner of hoopla that is likely illegal and certainly bad for you.

That’s what liberty looks like - every conceivable form of happiness being publically pursued under one proudly waved flag.  Is it so unbearable?  We Libertarians would let ‘er rip the other 364 days of the year if we had our druthers.  Pray, play, or work all day – whatever floats your boat.

The government that was tossed aside in 1776 did not originate the idea of self-rule; it did not confer sovereignty upon its citizens, and it did not find the truth of natural rights to be self-evident, an endowment from the Creator.  That government claimed the Creator himself gave it the power to rule; it deemed itself the arbiter of goodness and the provider of the general welfare.  It rejected the notion of “consent of the governed”, and it considered the wealth of the people to be its own.  

That government was not reformed, it was not streamlined, it was not constrained, it was not tilted to the right or left of its center - it was abolished.  And it would be 13 years before the Constitution would empower another in 1789. 

Who can imagine dissolving our government this July 4^th and not constituting a replacement until 2023?  This truly was the home of the brave….once.    

They abolished the entire government, while we are afraid to abolish the Department of Education.   They fought and died for their freedom, while we won’t bother to vote for ours. They sacked the entire bureaucracy, while we are afraid to limit their raises. They gave government 13 years off and we freak out over a furlough day.

What happened to us?  When did we give up on ourselves?  Why do we believe that we are incapable of individual sovereignty, unfit for self-rule?  Who is teaching us that we are less worthy of liberty than our foreparents?  Why do we listen to these people?  Why do we elect them to speak for us?

The colonials were no different from us; we are separated only by time, technology and fashion.  Their civic challenges – trade, security, employment, energy, education, health, charity, foreign relations, poverty, homelessness, crime, pollution, nutrition, elder care – were far more daunting than anything we face today, while their means of coping were primitive by our standards.

And after thirteen freezing winters, thirteen blazing summers, thirteen deadly influenza seasons, and thirteen years of unregulated business cycles, did they run back to government for protection?  Did you run back to Mommy and Daddy’s once you moved out?  Neither did they.

They created a federal government that was strictly limited, that preserved liberty to the maximum extent practical in an ordered society of peaceful citizens.  Not on a whim, not on a theory, but after thirteen years of living free and facing the consequences with eyes wide open.  They found the benefits of liberty so far outweighed the costs they forbid government from encroaching on it legally.    

Our task is far less demanding, and we do not need to take up arms to abolish our government; our founders provided the opportunity for a revolution every two years via the ballot box - another mulligan every even-numbered year.

We have strayed far from the path of liberty.  We moved back in with Mommy and Daddy and now we resent living in the basement under their rules.  It is not their fault that we seethe, it is ours; we need to move out and make it on our own.  And we will all get along much better with Mommy and Daddy when we just stop by to visit from time to time. 

It is our turn to declare our independence from government, just as our predecessors did in 1776.  The clear lesson of history is that freedom and prosperity are inexorably linked, while tyranny and poverty are equally certain companions.  We are known by the company we keep.

On July 4, 1776, our founders chose the former and rejected the latter.  We don’t even have to find the words, we just need to repeat them: “We find these truths to be self evident…..”  

Each of us will be remembered for what we did, not for what we hoped to do; this November we will be remembered for either restoring our liberty and securing the prosperity of generations to come, or for failing to do so when we knew it was our last chance.  

As we celebrate this Independence Day with our family and friends, let us commit ourselves to reclaiming our liberty.  And with each illegal firework, let us remember what it is we are celebrating – our independence from government.  

Happy Independence Day!

“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.

Something You Can Do

Each of us will be remembered for what we did, not for what we hoped to do.  President Obama is discovering the limits of hoping as a leadership strategy as he faces withering criticism of his response to the BP spill.

I’m not going to fault the President for the speed of his response; or for failing to emote enough to satisfy those who want an Oprah-in-Chief to run the country.  Like just about everyone else who has penned a word on the catastrophe, I don’t have a clue how to cap the leak or contain the spill. 

But I know who does - a handful of Belgian and Dutch companies who operate fleets of special vessels which have been used to contain spills around the world.  There are over 50,000 oil wells on the ocean floor – do you think this is the first to blow? 

Do you remember those dreadful scenes of oil-drenched Norwegian fiords, or the helpless birds stuck in the ooze in Kuwait, or the miles and miles of black gunk layered over the beaches of Saudi, Dubai, and UAE?  That’s right, you don’t - because when those underwater wells blew, these foreign fleets scooped up all the oil before it ever hit shore.

As soon as the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, the Dutch and Belgians and eleven other countries immediately offered to send their oil-sucking fleets to the Gulf, but President Obama refused to allow it.  The use of these vessels is prohibited by the Jones Act, and unlike past Presidents in times of crisis, he has refused to waive it.

The Jones Act is a 1920 law that prohibits the use of foreign vessels and crews to transport cargo between U.S. ports.  It can be waived by Presidential order at his discretion. It was enacted to protect union shipbuilding jobs, although like all protectionist measures, it has had just the opposite effect and we now produce less than 1% of the world’s ships.  At this point, it is pure symbolism.

Among the types of ships that we don’t build are the specialty craft which contain and clean up oil spills.  We will never know whether or not those foreign crews could have prevented the BP oil from making landfall – they say they would have, and I have no reason to doubt their optimism.    

The point is that this all might have been prevented, and it certainly would have been greatly mitigated, if Mr. Obama had simply allowed them to help.  The President had the authority to waive the Act and he refused. That is 100% on him.

The White House explanation is beyond stupid; EPA’s Browner and HHS Napolitano have issued “clarifications” that that no waivers have been requested by foreign operators.  Technically true; but two days after Katrina, HHS Secretary Chertoff requested a blanket waiver and George Bush signed it that day.  Issuing procedural clarification memos is hardly forceful executive leadership, and I believe the Dutch, who say the Jones Act was a reason the State Department turned them down.   

Here’s the deal: when faced with the most horrific ecological crisis in U.S. history, this President could not bring himself to cross the imaginary picket line in his head.  He chose to make a meaningless and symbolic gesture of solidarity to union bosses who bankroll his Party and throw the ecology and the economy of the Gulf under the bus.  That’s it.    

Liberals, write this down: Obama did that.  Your guy. 

Not BP, not Haliburton, not George W. Bush, not Dick Cheney, not capitalism, not Libertarians, Republicans, or the Tea Party.  If the President is still looking around for a butt to kick, he should practice standing on one foot.  No need for him to get all furious, we have already done that job for him.

His decision is unforgivable. When we see the pictures of the dying birds and the fish rotting on the shore, we need to remember why it came to this: he could have waived the Act, but he refused.  Let that knowledge haunt you; it should.

Waiving the Act would not cost a single union job to be lost, anyway.  Even if it doesn’t help now, it would take away BP’s certain defense against the tort claims that will tie up courts for the next 30 years – “well, we were going to clean it all up 50 miles offshore but then this guy (points to the ex-President) refused to waive the Jones Act”.

I checked the websites of the Gulf coast unions subsidized by the Jones Act to see if perhaps one of them might have the decency to appeal to the President to save the beaches and estuaries of the neighborhoods most of them live in, but they are strangely silent on this subject.  Saving their moral outrage for Card Check, no doubt.

But you shouldn’t be silent. You should contact the White House, your elected Representatives, and anyone who will listen to demand that President Obama waive the Jones Act and allow these foreign specialists to come in and help minimize the damage from the BP spill. 

There isn’t much we can do about the crisis in the Gulf, but this is something.

“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.

Card Check Cannibals

Like many people, I oppose unions on principle.  That principle is: never negotiate the dinner menu with cannibals.  

American workers overwhelmingly reject unionism. According to a 2010 study by university researchers Barry Hirsch and David Macpherson, only 7.2% of private sector workers belonged to unions in 2009. 93% prefer to work union-free.

Union apologists blame their declining numbers on threats and intimidation of workers by evil capitalist employers.  Nice try, Norma Rae, but only 32.7% of public sector workers choose to be unionized, and last time I checked, John Galt was not running the Department of Labor.

As a guy who came up from the factory floor, I can assure you that workers are not stupid, gullible, or easily intimidated.  90% of private sector workers and 70% of public employees know they have a right to organize a union, and have freely chosen not to. 

But union bosses, like socialists everywhere, do not recognize the will of the people; they claim to embody the will of the people.  So they have tasked their wholly owned subsidiary, the Democrat Party, with depriving workers of their right to vote on workplace representation - to replace the secret ballot election with imposition of a union by the State.  This is an idea so hideous that even George McGovern – hardly a capitalist tool - came out of retirement to oppose it.       

The Senate Bill eliminating union elections is cynically titled the “Employee Free Choice Act”, commonly referred to as Card Check.  If Congress were subject to truth in advertising laws, it would be titled “Employee No Choice Act”, as its sole purpose is to deprive workers the right to choose.  

If enacted, Card Check will empower the government to impose a union on any employer when 50% of employees sign interest cards.  It also authorizes the government to impose contract terms if the union does not accept a company offer within 90 days.  It does not take a rocket surgeon to figure out that there is no incentive for either party to bargain, so the practical impact of the Bill is for government to set labor prices and benefits.  That should work well.     

Now, when it was Al Gore’s job on the line, Democrats were the party of no-chad-left-behind, remember?  Every single vote was precious, even the ones that weren’t cast. No such luck for us working stiffs; we are just an untapped source of union dues which funnel back into the Dems campaign coffers – a herd of cows to be milked each payday.     

State-imposed unionism is the antithesis of libertarian individualism in the workplace; economic subjugation and economic sovereignty are diametrically opposite ideals.  But opposition to unions can be justified on more practical grounds.

Unions protect incompetents from the consequences of their own actions, and force those consequences onto others – observe the Milwaukee Public Schools and General Motors. Individualism breeds exceptionalism, and exceptionalism is intolerable to the union collectivist.

Over my career I have been involved in five union organizing campaigns at three different firms; each one was marked by unions inflicting physical violence to persons and property to coerce the signing of interest cards.  Unions targeted the most vulnerable to get the number needed to call an election.  The idea that NLRB rules disadvantage unions is laughable.

The unions were defeated overwhelmingly in each one of those elections, and four of the five campaigns occurred during Democrat administrations, so the “stacked NLRB deck” argument won’t fly.  People who signed interest cards under duress voted against the unions in the secret ballot.  That is the problem Card Check solves for the unions. 

Under Card Check, unions would have been imposed upon those workers by their own government without any election.  Pause for a moment to reflect on the obscenity of that proposition: the right to remain union-free will be denied by the very government tasked with protecting that right. 

The Hirsch and Macpherson study also listed the unionization rate among public workers by state.  It is no coincidence that the 10 states which are more than 50% unionized are the 10 states teetering on insolvency – Wisconsin among them. 

We can now add government and education to the list of American industries devoured by the union cannibals: mining, shipbuilding, logging, steel, automobiles, appliances, electronics, textiles, airlines, machine tools, consumer products, furniture, musical instruments – the list is too long to recite.  

To a cannibal, success is being the last one in his tribe to die of starvation.  His union campaign is your invitation to dinner; Card Check lets the government RSVP on your behalf.  Fight back now, before it is too late.            

“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.

Jobs

None of us who actually create jobs were surprised at the dismal May employment numbers, while the President’s economists were shocked.  What does that tell you?

Excluding temporary census workers, only 25,000 private sector jobs were added in May, less than 20% of the number needed just to keep pace with the growth in the workforce.   The President’s crack team of Keynesian number crunchers had forecasted around 500,000. 

Mr. Obama somehow managed to blame businesses for the blown call, chiding them for unwarranted hiring reticence in the face of an expanding GDP.  In doing so, he displayed an unnerving lack of understanding of how jobs are created and how GDP is aggregated.

Businesses do not hire workers to grow the economy, to make a President’s economic recovery plan work, or to keep some magic ratio to GDP; we only hire workers to meet increased demand for our products and services.  And demand is not growing, it is shrinking.   

Government is “stimulating” the economy with deficit spending that exceeds 9% of GDP, yet total GDP growth drops to around 3% when consumer spending and business investment are added.  You do the math.        

While the government continues to insist that its stimulus schemes have jump-started the economy into recovery, the evidence says otherwise. Common sense would tell you that giving California teachers a raise will not stimulate an Ohio foundry to recall its laid off pipefitters.  

And who in their right mind would re-open a closed foundry or build a new one, facing increased taxes on profits and capital gains, a hostile regulatory environment, new and uncertain health care obligations, VAT, cap and trade energy rationing, and union card check? 

Nobody would, nobody is, and nobody will.  And that, Mr. President, is why those Ohio pipefitters are never getting their jobs back – ever.   

This is the cruel reality that government economists haven’t programmed into their computers’ forecasting models.  History is not repeating itself because humans act rationally and circumstances have changed.   

Why should an entrepreneur risk his depleted 401(k) to start a business that must pay higher minimum wages, provide mandated benefits, and comply with new health care record-keeping requirements, just so he can pay higher taxes on any profits that might remain?  Why not take a six figure government job and be set for life? 

We know how to create jobs; 40 million new American jobs were created in the last quarter of the 20^th century, the era of deregulation, tax reduction, fiscal restraint, monetary moderation, and free markets. 

And we know how to kill jobs; 8 million jobs have been lost in the past three years, the new era of increased regulation, tax increases, fiscal irresponsibility, monetary expansion, and government interventions into markets.

The key to economic recovery is not mysterious; we need only to extract the government monkey wrench and the market machinery will turn again on its own. 

Eliminate taxes on business earnings, capital gains, and inheritance; de-regulate over-regulated industries; dismantle corporate welfare subsidies, repeal health care, and stabilize the currency; stop cap and trade, stop card check, and vote down any new legislation that has the words “comprehensive” or “reform” in its title.

When markets work, people do.  Until the administration economists grasp that concept, they will continue to be shocked when their predictions don’t come true.

       

  

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.

Alternative Paths To Service

What I want to know is: if there is nothing wrong with discussing “alternative paths to service” with Senate candidates, then why is Rod Blagojevich going to jail?

The irony of another White House election tampering case revealed on the eve of the former Illinois Governor’s corruption trial is too rich to let pass without comment.   

Some will argue that the cases are not comparable; but others will see them as minor variations on the same theme.  Blago offered a job in exchange for a personal favor, and so did the President; the only difference is the favors demanded in trade. 

Blagojevich sought cash, the President something even more valuable to him, a Senator’s future votes.  It is not clear why we would consider the former more toxic than the latter in terms of their corrupting influence on our system of representative government. 

Now, in the grander scheme of things, White House meddling in partisan primary campaigns is hardly newsworthy.  No one should be shocked when politicians do politics, and we certainly have several much bigger fish to fry.   Chances are whatever happened is legal, since the laws are written by people who do things like this.

But the election tampering revelations do serve one important purpose, namely debunking the myth that those who occupy the top positions in government are selected on merit and qualification.  Move over, Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny, another imaginary friend is coming to join you in the discard pile.   

The Statists’ argument for big government rests on the premise that a complex modern society can and must be regulated by an elite directorship whose superior intellect, character, judgment, and expertise make them better qualified to make choices for us than we are to make them for ourselves.  

But Sestak and Romanoff were not recruited for their intellect, character, judgment, or expertise; they were an object of trade, a commodity.  Their singular qualification was a partisan political advantage for the President if they took the job. 

The top 3,000 positions in government are filled by Presidential appointment, and we have just been treated to a rare glimpse into that process – an unintended transparency in an administration that has promised us much and delivered little in that regard.

It should now be apparent to all of us why government is so reliably inept, petty, and frivolous.  It is being run by two kinds of people unfit to serve: those who would make the offer in the first place, and those who take the deal.

Any system which can only work if angels run it will fail miserably with mere mortals at the controls.  We are watching the mortals make a mess of it on a daily basis.    

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.