How Many Architects?

The statists’ argument that government intervention is necessary to correct market failures is easily defeated by asking just this one simple question: how many more architects do we need?  

The belief that government must intervene to correct market failures rests on the assumption that government always knows the "right" answer; how else could it determine when the market has arrived at the wrong one?  The absurdity of that notion is quite evident when we think about how the central planners would go about determining the “right” number of additional architects we need.

To figure out how many more architects we need, they would first need know how many we have, and how old they are, and when each one will retire, get too sick to work, move, or die.   Next, they would need to know how many projects will be proposed and then undertaken in every city in the nation, along with how many hours each will take to be designed.  To know that, they would need to know the future building plans and financial condition of every company, non-profit, and person in this nation, along with their style preferences and schedules for starting and completing their projects.

Not to mention the availability and cost of credit to finance these projects, which means they must know what the Federal Reserve and thousands of banks will do with interest rates in response to general economic conditions.  This, naturally, means they would need to know what the general economic conditions are going to be, and since the economy is global, that means they would have to know basically everything there is to know about everything everywhere.  No doubt that President we-do-big-things Obama would call this massive and futile undertaking an investment in our future.   

Since it takes about ten years to educate and field an experienced architect, they would need to know everything about everything for the next ten years of economic activity world-wide.  The statist’s first instinct would be to overcome this dilemma by requiring everyone in the world apply for daily living permits that must be approved ten years in advance, and load all of the economic decisions into a massive computer model.  

Given the government's inability to forecast next weeks' new unemployment claims, the chances of projecting trillions of variable data points ten years into the future and coming up anywhere remotely close to the right number of architects needed are exactly…zero.  And the government would not just get it hopelessly wrong; it would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to get it hopelessly wrong.  And we would all spend our entire days filling out the forms it would need to collect all the data required to be hopelessly wrong in the digital age. 

Yet markets accomplish this feat day after day with ease.  Game, set, match. 

Have you ever needed an architect and had to wait ten years for the next one to become available?  Are there millions of surplus architects hanging out at Home Depot or perched at traffic islands holding homemade signs that say "will enhance dimensional context for food"?  No, you haven't, and no, there aren't.  Free markets do not produce chronic surpluses and shortages; it takes government intervention to produce such distortions. 

Markets supply the right numbers of architects to the right numbers of firms without anyone forcing anyone else to do anything.  How?  The same way markets supply the right numbers of thousands of professions to millions of employers every day - by simply allowing people to make self-interested choices of their own volition.  The invisible hand of capitalist free markets performs this and every other economic task far better, far faster, and far cheaper than the heavy hand of coercive government.

For nearly a century, government has taken upon itself the authority to intervene and impose its we-know-better judgment on wages, benefits, working conditions, credentials, union membership, and licensure.  Along the way it has promulgated innumerable industry-specific mandates and restrictions, and outlawed some professions altogether.  The more it tries to “help”, the worse of a mess it makes. 

With the passage of ObamaCare last year, the State greatly raised the stakes for inadvisable market intervention; it will soon impose its own judgments over how many doctors and nurses will practice and how much they will get reimbursed for their services.  The rationale for this unprecedented intervention of central planning is to "keep the private sector honest", and to correct the "failures of the market". 

But before we go ahead and turn over nearly one fifth of our economy - and the labor markets for those professions who will make our most critical life and death decisions - to Mr. Obama's beloved central planners, I think it is prudent to ask him just one question, if I may. 

Mr. President - how many more architects to we need?

"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 and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.” 

One In A Roe

While the President made decent jokes about salmon and TSA pat-downs in his State-Of-Delusion speech Tuesday night, the real howler came out on Monday, when he released the following statement on abortion:   

“Today marks the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects women's health and reproductive freedom, and affirms a fundamental principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters. I am committed to protecting this constitutional right.”

Committed to not intrude on private family matters?  There’s one in a Roe.  

Now, don’t think this a post about abortion; that is a serious subject and it is getting harder and harder to take anything the President says seriously anymore. This is about the hypocrisy of inventing a constitutional right for that one solitary purpose, while totally disregarding the explicit constitutional protections that govern all other matters; the absurdity of being pro-choice on only one thing, and choosing the termination of life as your one thing.

Did the President really say with a straight face that he is committed to the fundamental principle of keeping the government from intruding on private family matters?  How about invoking that fundamental principle on such private family matters as what we choose to eat, drink, smoke, drive, buy, sell, own, shoot, carry, pray, earn, save, drive, ride, wear, teach, grow, insure, say, pay, contribute, hunt, fish, advertise, marry, listen to, access on-line, heat our homes with, travel to, or pass to our heirs?  

Abortion is a decision that the majority of women and all of us men will never have to face; and those women who do will visit it only once or twice in their lifetimes.  But in all other areas of our lives, unwelcome and unconstitutional government intrusions are a daily occurrence and growing more frequent each time one of Obama’s Czars picks up a pen. 

His “commitment” to constitutional rights must have a provision for some of those infamous Obama waivers, because I cannot think of any three Presidents combined who have sought to intrude on private family matters as much as this guy has.  And when he runs out of us people to lord over, he moves on to the critters - according to his State of the Union speech, we now have three agencies “in charge of the salmon”.  In charge?  If I was a salmon, I would be already be organizing a tea party and fitting Sarah Palin with scuba gear out of spite.    

Pro-lifers believe that life begins at conception.  Pro-choicers believe life begins at the point of viability independent of the mother.  Statists believe that life begins at the moment they can register one more living thing to regulate the crap out of and it ends when there is nothing left to tax.

Mr. Obama’s support for abortion rights is not surprising; the unborn child is not yet available to the State anyway so it is of no use to those of his ideological bent. His government can afford to wait for the next one; it claims ownership of the CO₂ in the newborn’s first wail, and it is all downhill from there.  To demand that an individual be protected from government interference for his/her first nine months of life, and then be subjugated for the hundreds of months that will follow is the kind of irrational thinking that appeals to people who prefer to do very little of it – people who require two sittings to take in “hope and change”.

There was nothing newsworthy in the President’s SOTU speech.  But I wish he wouldn’t have called for science to receive as much attention as the Super Bowl, because now Brett Favre will probably try to come out of retirement and play quarterback for that Science Fairs team Mr. Obama referred to, if his agent can find out what city they play in.  Or maybe not.  Or maybe. Depends.  Kinda.

The House repealed ObamaCare last week, and in 2012 the rest of us will get our turn to repeal its namesake at the polls.   In the meantime, we will have to endure a few more rambling repetitions of the liberal mantra – trains, taxes, and tenure.  And a few more moments of bald-faced hooey like “the government should not intrude on private family matters”, which will remind me to thank my son for teaching me what ROTFLMAO means in text-speak.          

“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 and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”  

Right To Work

The principle is not difficult to grasp: if you are the owner of you, then you have a right to work. If you do not have the right to work, then someone else owns you.  If you oppose your right to work, but you don't know who else it is that owns you, may I suggest...me.

We'll call it the TimFL-CIO, and here is how it works: the government forces your employer to withhold dues from each pay check and send them to…me.  That’s right - you will pay me to take away your right to work. 

I will decide what wage you will work for; it will be a lot less than mine.  I will decide your benefit package; it will be a lot worse than mine.  I will decide your pension; it won't be guaranteed like mine is.  Sorry, no car for you, but I get a new one every year, even after I retire.  No foreign-made Prius for this guy, no way; union-made Escalade, thank you very much – smoked glass, spinners, maybe a little neon under the chassis. Us union bosses have an image to maintain, and TimFL-CIO is swimming with the big fish, baby.

And I will decide which candidates you will support with the dues your employer confiscated for me.  I will decide which legislation you will be for, and which you will be against.  My position on everything is your position.  I will pick the leadership of TimFL-CIO and you can rest assured it will be...me.  I will go to the TimFL-CIO convention in Vegas, the leadership training in Miami, and host the Superbowl party in Dallas.  First-class tickets, penthouse suites, limo, and "secretaries" - lots and lots of secretaries.  Ok, my wife won’t let me go for the secretaries, but it was in the job description, I swear.

When I order another bargaining unit to go on strike, I will double your dues to help me...er...them cope.  If you have a grievance, question, or even a suggestion at you workplace, you bring it to me, and I will decide whether or not to bother with it.  However I settle it; it's settled.  When you break my union rules, I’ll fine you, and if you think I'm wrong, you can appeal it to...me.  Tell you what - I will screw you over for half of what the other guys charge in monthly dues, how's that?  Think of me as the Walmart of WEACs, the Target of Teamster, the stingy man’s SEIU.  50% off – you can’t go wrong!

Now, if TimFL-CIO seems like a rotten deal to you, that’s because it is…a rotten deal.  And if you are dumb enough to think it magically becomes a good deal when we double the price and put “amalgamated” or “brotherhood” or “international” or “association” in the name of the racket, then you probably deserve to lose your job.  It’s not like your unions can save it for you anyway.

Unions lost 612,000 members in 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics – that’s what happens when you choke the life out of your employer. Unions now represent only 6.9% of the private sector workforce, the lowest proportion since the 1930’s. It should come as no surprise that 93.1% of people who work think it is a bad idea to pay someone to take away their right to work.  What is remarkable is that nearly 7% still don’t get it.

When you add the fact that most union elections are won on slim margins, it puts the percentage of private sector workers who have chosen union representation of their own volition at around 4%, slightly more than the number who are gay, and far fewer than the number who are left-handed.  That puts the Right-To-Work issue in its proper perspective, now, doesn't it?   

Would we allow Right-To-Vote legislation to be blocked by the gay southpaw lobby in Madison?  I think not.  Would we permit free speech be restricted to support of the LGBT agenda written in cursive with a backward slant?  Fat chance.  Then why should we care what the unions think of RTW in Wisconsin?  We are under no obligation to negotiate the dinner menu with cannibals.  Our right to work is a civil right, not a policy preference.

There is only one reason unions have power and influence; they buy Democrat politicians with tons of cash - cash that was confiscated from worker pay checks in the only protection racket sanctioned by the State.  The last union stronghold is government, where employees are being held as human shields and money launderers so the unions can plunder state treasuries with impunity.  Right-To-Work frees the hostages and shuts down the rackets.  Pick your side.

All of the data tells us that low-tax, RTW states outperform high-tax, highly unionized states in terms of economic growth, job creation, unemployment, and fiscal health. Over the past decade, real personal income in Right-To-Work states has increased at double the rate of forced-union states.  The unionists’ claim that passing RTW impoverishes people is a flat-out lie.  22 states have enacted Right To Work protection and prospered; the other 28 states need to join them.  A coalition of conservative and libertarian voters fired the Democrats in November and put the GOP in charge of fixing our hostile business climate.  So fix it, Party of Prebus. 

The percentage of unionized workers in the private sector has shrunk by nearly 70% in the past 40 years.  One need look no further than Detroit, that monument to UAW political influence, to see why thinking people choose not to sacrifice a life of work for a slogan.  Or the idle mines of Upper Michigan, or the empty steel mills of Pittsburgh, or the vacant shipyards of Baltimore and Philadelphia, or the whole state of California, whose unions have brought it so low that Mexico doesn't want it back any more. 

This year, government workers are about to discover what permanently unemployed textile workers up and down the East Coast already know: the only people who prosper under the unions are the union bosses.  Norma Rae was a movie; the reality show has a much different ending. As states and municipalities face the spectre of bankruptcy, jobs will be cut, pensions will be reduced, and the unions will have killed yet another goose that could have laid golden eggs for generations to come.  Too bad we let them take our schools down with them in their Epic Fail.

American workers are not stupid; our politicians are.  The Right To Work for the 96% of us who choose to work union-free is guaranteed by the Constitution, as is the Right To Organize that 4% of us have freely chosen. By imposing compulsory unionization, our government denies the civil rights of the former to reward the thugs who claim to represent the latter.  Stacking the NLRB with extortionists does not make extortion right, it just makes it easier.    

Democrats have totally sold out to dirty union money.  The Libertarian Party unequivocally defends the individual Right To Work in our principled party platform.  Where are the Republicans?  96% of American workers would like to know. 

“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 and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”  

American Pie

Here is the difference: socialists fret over giving everyone an equal slice of the pie, while capitalists bake more pies.  Which is better - abundance distributed unequally, or an equal ration of scarcity? Capitalists choose abundance.

Wealth is created when materials, labor, and capital are employed to add value. The baker takes $1 worth of ingredients (material) mixes and kneads and rolls and forms it (labor) and bakes in an oven (capital), and creates a pie worth $6 to the market – i.e. you, the consumer. The pie is wealth; the $5 of value-added realized in the exchange is the measure of it.   

The illusion of wealth is not wealth; the dollars exchanged for the pie are not pie.  True prosperity is measured in pies, and economic growth is the making of more pie, not the printing of more money.  If Ben Bernanke devalues the inch by 50%, it doesn’t make me grow, even though the FED’s tape will “prove” that I am 12 feet tall.  

Everyday, our nation of bakers goes to work and makes pies – that is real GDP. Is there any more pie when the Federal Reserve adds $600 billion of “quantitative easing”?  Is there more pie when Congress extends unemployment benefits?  Is there more pie when government increases the baker's taxes? Is there more pie if the EPA rations energy to the baker for his ovens?  Is there more pie if the oven must be made in the USA?  Is there more pie if the baker is forced to pay his helpers higher wages?  Is there more pie if they are forced to join a union? No, no, no, no, no, no and no. 

Is there more pie when we force the baker to provide health care or pay a fine?  Is there more pie when the Department of Pies mandates standardized national pie testing?  Is there more pie when government employees of DOP get a pay raise?  Is there more pie when we invade another country?  Is there more pie if we borrow money from the Chinese to pay interest on the debt we owe to the Saudis?  Or use it to bail out a few big banks' gambling losses?  Or subsidize unprofitable corporations? Or give pay raises to teachers?  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no and no.

And they wonder why the economy is not growing.  How could we expect a group of anti-capitalist lawyers, politicians, and academics with virtually no business experience to craft a pro-growth economic policy that would encourage businesses to form, grow, and prosper?  It would have been sensible to ask the bakers how we could make more pies; instead they called us names and blamed us for their mistakes.

The socialists have had their turn; we have gone hungry for three years now since their baker’s rack of cards collapsed in an embarrassing Epic Fail.  They have no idea how to fix it, because they have no clue that they broke it in the first place.  It is time for them to step aside and let the capitalists do what we do best – make more pies. 

Step one is to lower taxes on work, savings, capital, profit, and trade.  There is no other way to stimulate economic growth.  To make more pies, we need more bakers willing to add more ovens, and use more energy, streamline processes, invent new methods, hire more workers and insure they employed more productively.  Bakers will not risk their life savings and work day and night to enrich the IRS.

Step two is to deregulate markets, liberate the workplace, and end subsidies so choice and competition can flourish.   There is no other way to unlock the potential of our best and brightest entrepreneurs, workers, and traders.  The only way workers will ever make more money in the bakery is if they bake more pies. And innovation only happens through competition, and competition only happens in free markets, and by that I mean free from government control and mandatory unionization. Crony capitalism is not capitalism any more than date rape is dating.

Step three is to celebrate our most successful capitalists, not demonize them.  Their desire for more profit is what drives down costs, and lower costs drive down prices.  And the more that capitalists drive down prices, the more pies people can buy for themselves and their families.  Not just more affordable pies, but a greater variety of pies – lots and lots of different kinds of delicious pies. 

Capitalism brings about an abundance of pie.  There is no other way to produce surplus; abundance is freedom’s greatest gift. Capitalism is waiting to give it to us, but we are denying it to ourselves. 

Because the socialists hate free-range pie. They want to control it and allocate it, and direct it to their own purposes.  Their beloved government can not create pie; it can only redistribute; taking the pies from the people who made them and giving them to people who did not, and eating half along the way. Socialists call this justice; that is their opinion. But they also call it prosperity; and that is demonstrably wrong.

If you have two pies, you are wealthier than when you have one, are you not?  If I bake ten pies, are you any less wealthy? No, you are not.  If the State taxes away our surplus pies we both have one pie – equality has been achieved. But are you wealthier with your one equality pie than when you had two and I had ten?  No, you are not.  You are poorer. That’s what socialism delivers in the name of equality.  Always.  Everywhere.  Every time.  

So we are both less wealthy - and we are angry.  We blame each other for our anger; we both think the other is greedy, and we both fear we will starve to death as a result.  What was taken from us was more valuable than the pie; it was the good will and peace that once existed between us.  Capitalists did not divide us; the socialists did that.

On some other planet, where wise angels rule over nations of saints, I would be a socialist, too; but we live on this one, and we have 5,000 years of communal mistakes to learn from.  Free market capitalism is the only economic system compatible with the ideal of individual liberty; voluntary exchange is the only moral transaction between equal sovereigns.  We need more pie, not smaller equal slices.

“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 and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”  

Climate Change

For many years, the left has sought to deflect criticisms of its job-killing economic ideology with the false promise that government investment in green technology would create a renaissance in American manufacturing, as if more government could cure the injuries caused by too much government.

The problem with the socialists’ “green jobs” theory is that the contrived incentives designed by academics, politicians, and speculators who are overtly hostile to industry can’t overcome the adversarial regulatory, tax, and tort climate that drives capital investment and jobs out of this country.  Their puny temporary ladders won’t get anyone over their enormous permanent fences.

Recent failures of several prominent “green” showcase projects – Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, Tulsa, to name just a few - demonstrate the obvious point that well-intentioned environmentalists can not seem to grasp: the laws of economics, just like the laws of physics, can not be amended to fit our hopes, beliefs, and desires.        

The foundry does not know whether its castings will be used to make windmills or nuclear warheads. It only knows that the EPA is cutting off its energy supply, the NLRB wants to impose a union, new health care mandates increase its operating costs, their unemployment insurance rates are going through the roof, and DOL raised their minimum wage. 

If they can somehow survive the fishing expeditions of OSHA, ADA, EEOC, and IRS auditors, they get to take on the harassment of state and local bureaucracies and a network of collaborating environmental activists hell-bent on shutting them down.  If they are still standing, a fleet of slip-n-trip lawyers awaits, hoping to hit the lottery with a non-stop barrage of spurious lawsuits and class-action shakedowns. 

If you are looking for climate change that will improve our standard of living, start with changing the hostile business climate that has driven industry after industry off-shore, unilaterally surrendered our energy independence, and destroyed our economic base.  The green jobs are being created in China for the same reason all the other jobs are being created in China – the left won’t let us make things here.   

But the folks who make those puny temporary ladders are living large.  Somebody has to write the bills that start the money flowing, somebody has to write the grants asking for the handouts, somebody must manage the subsidies to make sure they are all being properly peed away, somebody must lobby for more spending, somebody must market the boondoggles, somebody must drive Al Gore’s limousine, light T-Boone Pickens’ cigars, and buy Bill Gates’ software to blog about climate change. 

And don’t forget conferences – lots and lots of conferences – and research – can’t have a proper gluttonous orgy at the public trough without research.  How did that song go?  Look for…the union la-bel….guess what strings are attached to the construction of the alternative energy infrastructure that goes belly up a few years after it is built, even with operating subsidies that run into the billions.  There’s your green jobs; some union patronage and an expansion of the public payroll dole whose only long-term return on our green investment will be even higher pension liabilities we can’t pay for.  

The first solar panel was patented in 1888; the first wind turbine factory was built in 1891; bio-fuels preceded oil as a source for combustion engines.  If these were economically viable energy sources, the private sector would have developed and deployed them to scale decades ago. Fact is, the massive amounts of energy it takes to make and move the things that 310 million Americans want can not be produced by renewable sources; only by the three F’s – fossil, fission, and fusion.   

Environmentalists argue that fossil fuels are also heavily subsidized; that the cost of harm to the commons – pollution of the air and water and consequences of CO2 emissions – are not born by the energy producers, who are viewed as profiteering free riders. Their complaints extend to mining, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, virtually every goods-producing field of endeavor.  It is a valid argument as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.

Imagine yourself sitting in an intensive care unit, praying for your severely injured child to survive the night.  Look around: everything made of plastic came from a barrel of oil. Everything made of metal or glass was mined. Every woven good was made in factories that run on fossil fuel energy.  Every light, pump, monitor, and communications device is consuming energy and emitting carbon as it works to save her life. And every single thing in that room, including your precious little girl and the doctors and nurses who will deliver God’s answer to your prayers, was transported there in a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine. The only reason any of those things came into existence is because capitalists made money on them. 

Was their profit excessive?   Is the tragedy of the commons more important than the tragedy of human potential unnecessarily denied?  Not if it is my little girl.  

Maurice Strong, head of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and until recently, Executive Officer for Reform in the U.N. Secretary General's office, put the climate change industry’s cards on the table, when he wrote, "Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized nations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?"

No, Mr. Strong, it isn’t.  Our responsibility is to insure that liberty is restored in this nation, so that little girls and boys grow up and thrive in a land of opportunity, liberty, and prosperity.  The only hope for the planet is that guys like you have the right to freely speak your mind, but no power to impose your ridiculous notions onto others.

The planet will be saved when human potential is liberated from the burden of government-imposed mediocrity, when education displaces indoctrination in government-monopoly schools, and when free market capitalism forces socialist state crony-corporatism into hasty retreat.

Less government means more real jobs; and real jobs come in all colors – including green. We have wasted enough time on the wrong answer, and we need to get government out of the way of market solutions that will solve our most urgent problems.   

  

“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 and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”  

Voter ID

Wisconsin’s Republicans want to require a state-issued photo ID to vote in order to stop rampant voter fraud.  Democrats oppose the measure, claiming that tens of thousands of voters would be disenfranchised – all Democrats, of course.  Both positions are overblown, and neither can claim to be driven by noble principle with a straight face.

When all the partisan spinning, posing, and posturing are done, here’s the deal: Republicans don’t want elections decided by Mexicans, and Democrats don’t want any restriction on their ability to fabricate vote counts.  There’s your moment of clarity.  If either party was truly interested in expanding voter empowerment, they would drop the rules put in place to stifle independent candidates and third parties.

Republicans are more than a little paranoid on this whole Mexican thing; millions of Mexican nationals are not pouring across the border hoping to work their way up to Wisconsin in time to vote against Paul Ryan in the next primary; they just want jobs in Arizona and Texas.  And felons and FIBS are not the reason that Gwen Moore and Tammy Baldwin have lifetime tenure in Congress; we could require a DNA match and carbon dating at the polls and it would not change the margins of victory that gerrymandering has engineered for them.   

Democrats are even more disingenuous; the No-Chad-Left-Behind crowd is having kittens over voter ID while it is hell-bent on disenfranchising every single worker in the country by eliminating secret ballot union elections.  Is there really an oppressed “community” who do not drive, fly, work, buy cigarettes, cash checks, fish, hunt, buy liquor, use credit cards, rent apartments, take out loans, get married, go to the library, or request a public record – all of which require a State-issued photo ID – but do vote religiously? Hard to cram all that on a T-shirt and still have room for a rainbow.     

Libertarians can come at the voter ID issue from either direction, but is frankly hard to get all indignant about something we are happy to do to get our hockey tickets at the Will-Call box.  On one hand, we reflexively oppose any form of “human license” required by the capital “S” State; on the other hand, we revere the Constitution and take the rights and responsibilities of citizenship quite seriously.  The Supreme Court ruled decisively in 2008 that state voter ID laws are constitutional (national REAL ID is a whole different subject), so it really comes down to a pragmatic question: how much additional hassle should we impose to discourage and prevent vote tampering?     

Here’s what I think: in a Constitutional democracy, voting is sacrosanct.  The United States of America was founded on the principle of self-sovereignty, where the authority to act is delegated to government from fully empowered citizens, not the other way around.  Choosing the people who will hold temporary stewardship of those delegated powers is the most solemn obligation we have as citizens of our nation.  It is not unreasonable to insist that only eligible citizens participate in our only civic sacrament.   

Surely the danger posed to society from vote tampering is far greater than that posed by an underage puff on a Camel.  Acts of voter fraud are certain to occur in each election cycle, while acts of terrorism are ridiculously improbable; and yet the government makes me show it a state-issued photo ID, a travel voucher, and my unit before I can fly on plane that does not belong to them. 

Voter ID is not an undue hardship and the only class of people who will be disenfranchised when it is enacted is vote-riggers.  They will have to move back to Illinois, and we will take the businesses they are taxing out of their state.  Good trade.  

“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 and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”  

Delusional

When my libertarian friends railed against the FCC’s seizing authority over the Internet right before Christmas, I honestly didn’t get what all of the fuss was about.  In the aftermath of the tragedy in Tucson, I get it.  I really get it.

Imagine if Saturday’s shooting would have occurred in Internet-less world.  The Sheriff would have linked the shooter to the Tea Party, and the mainstream media would run with it, embellishing the narrative to include Sarah Palin, talk radio, Arizona’s immigration law, racism, and efforts to repeal the health care mandate and all the other crazy stuff that got thrown on the pile last Saturday in the world series of bullshit. 

CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, AP, Reuters – the media would report the Palin causal connection as fact, while the opinion pages would describe the tea parties as Klan rallies held in ammo dumps.  Columnists and Congressmen would demand new prohibitions on guns, speech, association, and privacy, and legislatures would eagerly comply with hurried legislation in response to the clear and present danger posed by a “vast right-wing conspiracy” whose 20 Arizona victims are just the tip of the coming iceberg.

It is now quite clear that the Tucson narrative fabricated by the left was entirely wrong; ideology played no part in this tragic shooting whatsoever.  Rather, an individual who was mentally ill set out to avenge a perceived personal slight when he tried to assassinate a Congresswoman for not adequately answering his previously asked question about grammar and word meanings.   

But why do we know that?  How did we come too learn the truth that it was a psychotic obsession with the meaning of words, and not our “toxic tone” in political debate that caused 20 people to be shot?  The Internet, that’s how we know; that is the only reason we know. The same Internet that the Government will soon censor, license, regulate, and monitor your usage of – the FCC’s Internet. 

We did not learn the truth of Tucson from major news outlets, editorial writers, civic leaders, elected officials, law enforcement, President, or Secretary of State, all of whom either parroted the lie or only begrudgingly acknowledged facts that others had discovered and tweeted, shared, reposted, and liked.    

No, we learned the truth of Tucson from Youtube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, texting, and from thousands of bloggers who exposed the tea-party-did-it narrative as a vindictive partisan fraud within hours of its transparently coordinated launch.  

Unfazed, MSM outlets continued to promote the big lie for days later, easily traversing the declining ethical half-lives that separate speculation from denial from deception from propaganda from delusion.  As of this writing, they remain in a delusional state – trapped in a fantasy world of their own making where millions of tea-bots lurk locked-and-loaded and waiting for the fillings in their molars to vibrate with the low frequency signal from Palin and Beck to open fire.   

Do you realize how close we came to our own American Kristallnacht?  If the FCC had already developed its capability to block content – as it aims to do - which of the two Tucson narratives do you think would be suppressed in the name of “net neutrality”: the statist party line wherein Sarah Palin and the tea party caused a massacre, or the alternative where a drug abusing mentally ill loner tried to kill a Congresswoman over an inadequate answer to his concern about grammar?  When the bandwidth is prioritized by FCC, will you read about Tucson at Dr. Tim’s Moment of Clarity or Paul Krugman’s Daily Dose of Donkey Dung?  

We would never know he was an atheist, a lunatic, a loner, a left-inspired anarchist drop-out with a history of violent threats and unstable impulses.  We would know only what the government propagandist wants us to know – tea party did it.  They would photoshop a Gadsden Flag hat on that bald head in his mug shot.  It would be a blatant lie, a slander of the most despicable sort, a reckless smear whose sole purpose is to create the illusion of crisis requisite to convince the American people to cede more of our liberty to a government whose appetite for control is insatiable.

This is not paranoid speculation; we have just witnessed the new depths to which the left will sink to achieve their aims.  For days now, we have read for ourselves the statist narrative that would have gone uncontroverted but for a free and unregulated Internet.  It is one thing for members of the media to jump to a wrong conclusion in a panic; such indiscretions are forgivable in the age of instant news and analysis. 

But it is quite another to participate in a sustained coordinated campaign to distort, suppress, and misrepresent the truth.  Not just some, but all of the major news outlets participated in the Tucson “toxic tone” conspiracy.  None of them – not one – has apologized for the bile and invective they cast about and the character assassinations they unleashed without a scintilla of evidence to justify their charges. 

It is because they have no remorse, no shame, no integrity.  That is why they are broke and failing, no other reason.  They are not sorry for what they have done, and they will not be, because they believe their ends justify any means.  They do not see that they have done wrong; only that it did not work; thwarted again by the Internet and the millions of freethinkers who use it.  These are the kind of people who go to work at FCC when their papers close down; regulating that Internet that ruined their cushy lives to insure it fits the correct statist notion of “neutrality”. 

Now that we know what that term will mean shortly, Jerod Louchner’s bizarre question to Congresswoman Giffords is positively chilling: “what is government if words have no meaning?”  And here, my friends, is the adequate answer to his question:  it is force - raw, brute, pure force.  Fight 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 and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”  

Toxic

Five people were killed in Tucson Satuday; can you name them?  John Roll, Gabe Zimmerman, Dorwin Stoddard, Dorothy Murray, Phyllis Sheck, Christine Greene.  May God comfort their families, and may the rest of us have the human decency to leave our politics out of their grief.

The oldest was 79, the youngest only 9 – one pastor, one judge, one Congressional staffer, two in their twilight years and one whose life was just dawning.  I suspect that the five life stories are fascinating, and the sixth would surely have been.  14 others were wounded, but we know the condition of only one – Congresswoman Giffords, on whose behalf the nation’s prayers were offered and apparently answered.  48 hours after the senseless shooting in Arizona, we know very little about these 19 other victims, and only sketchy information about the man who struck them down.   

But we know exactly what tens of thousands of politicos and bloggers think of the tea party, Sarah Palin, talk radio, communism, atheists, right and left wing rhetoric, guns, free speech,  Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, libertarians, conspiracy theorists, the need for new prohibitions galore, and the precise motivation of a mentally disturbed person they have never met.

Their need to seize center-stage and co-opt a horrific personal tragedy to advance their own careers and ideologies is what is toxic in this country, not the phrases or symbols by which ideas are conveyed to the 310 million Americans who did not shoot anyone on Saturday.  It took less than an hour for the mindless chattering class to chatter mindlessly.

The narcissism and callousness it takes to climb on top of  20  shattered bodies to reach the microphone first is sickening - that is the toxicity that afflicts our nation, not the choice of phrases or symbols used to communicate with 310 million Americans who did not kill anyone on Saturday.  

A senseless act, by definition, can not be understood in rational cause-and-effect terms.  Only one person knows what deviant impulse led him to slaughter numbers of people, and the rest of us are recklessly projecting our own fears into his head.  We may never know how that brain was molded over 22 years to become capable of such inhumanity; it most certainly did not get that way from one map on one web page, or anything that any of the victims may of may not have done to provoke the violence that was visited upon them. 19 of 20 were not public figures.  

A shameless act, by definition, is one in which a lack of shame is displayed.  Stepping on the grief of 20 families and the sympathies of a nation to draw the spotlight back onto partisan sparring is as shameless as I can imagine.  It does nothing to bring comfort to the families; it only deepens the stress they must certainly be coping with, and injects the very toxicity it purports to decry.

These are days to respect the privacy and loss of the families, and to withhold opinions until they can be informed by facts and evidence.  My condolences to the victims and their families, including the family of the man accused of the crime – they must be devastated, too.  May God comfort them all in their time of greatest need.

        

“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 and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”  

Monday in America

If more government is the answer, as liberals argue, then the 50% more of it that we added over the past decade would have proved their theory beyond a shadow of a doubt and I would be a raving socialist now. It did not, and I am not.               

In fiscal year 2000, it cost us $3.2 trillion to run the government at all levels – local, state, and federal.  In 2010, our government cost us $6.4 trillion - double.  And not all due to undeclared wars and federal bailouts; state and local government doubled too, from $1.7 trillion to $3.4 trillion. 

And how did we pay for all that additional government spending we added over the past decade?  We borrowed it; the gross public debt - local, state, and federal – increased from $7.1 trillion to $16.7 trillion during the decade just past.  

Democrats blame it all on Bush; Republicans put it all on Obama.  It’s like blaming the hangover on the last two drinks of a 100 year binger that started at Teddy Roosevelt’s dorm room. National and local, Red states and Blue states, big cities and tiny villages – in fiscal terms, they have all been partying like it was 1999 since…1899. 

It’s 2011 now, and the lost decade is over.  It’s Monday in America, and with heads a-throbbing, we are staring at our staggering bar tab with disbelief. 

  

After adjusting for inflation and the increase in population, the spending binge of the past decade amounts to more than a 50% increase in the size and cost of government.  In real inflation-adjusted terms, we have added half again as much of the stuff as we had just ten years ago.

Did we ask for 50% more government in 2000?  And does anyone feel 50% better governed now that we have 50% more of it?  Do we have anything to show for our 50% increase in government other than that additional $9.6 trillion of new debt?  Are we 50% happier?

Do we have 50% more roads, bridges, schools, airports, VA hospitals, fire stations, libraries, police precincts, national parks, ports, or postal deliveries? Did we add 25 more states, or maybe annex Canada?  Is our response to natural disasters 50% faster?  Are our children 50% better educated, our factories 50% more productive?

Did that increase of 50% in government bring about a 50% decrease in poverty, illiteracy, crime, disease, unemployment, drug abuse, domestic violence, teen pregnancy, high school dropout rates, pollution, gang violence, energy dependence, trade imbalances, workplace injuries, infant mortality, or fraud?  Are we 50% safer, 50% more free and 50% more prosperous?  

No, we are less safe, less free, and less prosperous – that is what we bought with 50% more government.  

Just as Friedman, Hayek, Mises, Rand, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Paul and the framers of the Constitution told us.  The other Friedman, Krugman, Keynes, Galbraith, Reich, Obama and all three Roosevelts promised we would be better off – they were wrong.  Our only consolation is that we didn’t go in for 75% or 100%.   

Democrats are still chirping and clucking about insufficient resources as if the 50% increase never happened.  Their talking points haven’t changed since I first heard the pitch more than 40 years ago.  Here’s the deal, Dems: you got the money, you spent it, it didn’t do jack squat, now give it up.

And Republicans prattle on as if it were a management problem they had nothing to do with, curable with better budgeting, an updated policy manual, and a dress code sure to improve productivity of the firm. With each new dose of GOP backtracking accountant-speak I am reminded why I left it years ago; I don’t know how Ron Paul hangs in there. The new Congress has pledged to cut its office spending by 10%; a nice gesture, but the proportional equivalent of plucking a hair from a leg needing amputation.  

Don’t expect the government to shrink itself.  The hysteria and hyperbole of government unions over the most modest of proposed reductions in the rate of increased spending tell us that reform must be done to them, not through them.  When you bloat yourself up from 200 to 300 pounds and then threaten violence over cutting out one Twinkie a week, you are in need of some seriously tough love.  

Our lost decade has shown us once again that Liberty, not government, is the path to peace and prosperity.  Government spending is the true measure of liberty denied; and liberty’s victories going forward will be tallied by dollars cut, not by promises made.

There is no intelligent argument to be made against cutting back on government; it will either be pared back or it will dissolve itself in certain default and the anarchy that will follow. A civil debate can, and should, center on how to save it; how much of it to eliminate and where.  Those who refuse to participate opt for irrelevance and we should pay no heed to their protestations – you can’t bring your stash to rehab.       

The liberty movement that swept across the nation does not owe an allegiance to any party, party leader, or special interest.  We are inspired by principle, led by conscience, and loyal only to ideas.  We sent a new generation of representatives to Washington D.C. and statehouses, county seats, and town halls across the nation with a single purpose – to shrink government.  We will judge them on how much they have accomplished by the next election in 2012.

Hope springs eternal, and everything that was done can be undone.  It’s Monday in America; the party’s over, and it’s time to go back to work. 

“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 and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”  

Relentless

Congressional sessions have become like NBA games: they pose, sleepwalk, and talk smack for most of it, then play like they mean it for the last five minutes. 

So in a flurry of activity that included every manner of legislative maneuver except for actually reading any of the bills that they passed, our 111^th Congress wrapped up its lame duck session by passing a new arms treaty, an extension – sort of - of the Bush tax cuts, unemployment benefit extension, emergency funding to keep the government going a couple more weeks, another war supplemental, DADT repeal, and a Food Safety Bill that marks the beginning of the war on gardening.

None of us knows for sure what the impact of any of these laws will be, since the media confined its coverage to the politics of it all – scoring wins and losses for the two parties and handicapping the 2012 Presidential field.  It would have been nice to know that we unilaterally gave up missile defense – relying instead on perpetual foreign occupation - before the vote on START.  Nice work, groupies.

President Obama was quite pleased with himself.  Apparently, for reasons that defy human understanding, he believes that the American people punished him at the polls in November for not doing enough.  And the pundits are hailing Harry Reid as the master tactician, as if we should be grateful to him for passing more unpopular bills that spend more money we don’t have by tossing more pork at the outgoing senators we fired in last year’s primaries.  If the GOP leadership learned anything from the November elections, it was not evident to me in the last days of the session.               

But the President and his crew saved their best stuff for Executive Orders, simply bypassing Congress altogether and putting the beat-down on liberty without the bother of securing a vote from those we pay to represent us in such matters.    

His FDA decreed we could drink alcohol or caffeine, but not together. His EPA decided it owns CO₂, the stuff we exhale. His Interior Secretary banned drilling in the Gulf.  He created a new Public Health Council to prioritize a list of “lifestyle behavior modifications” for the country. His TSA took it upon itself to give us the porn-pat-stay ultimatum.  His NLRB forced contractors to put up new pro-union posters in their lunchrooms.  The exceptions he granted to his ObamaCare mandate now outnumber the list of new mandates contained in the bill. And for the coup-de-grace, his FCC ended King Barack’s best-year-ever by taking over the Internet.

Relentless – that’s what they are. 

Relentless like Chuckie, that horror-movie doll who keeps coming after you even though he has been repeatedly and mortally wounded.  Special elections, falling poll numbers, primary races, BP spill fiasco, Spanish vacations, adverse court rulings, foreign policy embarrassments, the November shellacking, Charlie Rangel’s ethics violations, Juan Williams firing, state laws, Keith Olbermann’s suspension, voter intimidation, Climategate, WkiLeaks, ACORN busted – nothing stops our little socialist Chuckies. 

Did you have to take over the Internet, you relentless little Chuckies at FCC?  The one thing the government couldn’t keep up with, the one thing you couldn’t control, the one thing you haven’t ruined, the one thing that is better now than it used to be, the one thing we still do better than the rest of the world.  The one thing that sets us free…from you.  Was it so awful for you that we were happy?

And did you have to cut off Texas’ energy, you joyless prigs at EPA?  The one state that runs budget surpluses.  The one state with billions still in their rainy day fund.  The one state that never stopped creating jobs.  The state that businesses are moving to, not from. The state with no income tax, a part-time legislature, Right To Work, concealed carry; the state that follows the Constitution.  Was it just too humiliating to watch Nancy Pelosi’s and Barack Obama’s home states taxing and regulating themselves into liberal default while Ron Paul’s state thrives in liberty?    

Speaking of Nancy’s home state, how fitting that her own congressional district, San Francisco, was the one to ban Happy Meals.  I don’t know why they stopped there; just get it over with and ban Happy altogether.  Better yet, make happiness a hate crime, since you all hate it so much when anyone is happy without your permission. McDonalds should have thrown a condom in with the Transformers - the little Chuckies would be force-feeding McRibs to third graders and Ronald would be the Grand Marshall in the next parade.  

It is difficult for libertarians to imagine the lengths to which statists will go to force-fit society into the mold of their values and beliefs.  We lack the coercion gene, the need to be obeyed, and the burning desire to lord over our fellow citizens.  We are tolerant to a fault, trusting enlightened self-interest and personal responsibility in matters of human interaction. We respect each person as an equal sovereign; we find the herd model of today’s liberal shepherds to be dehumanizing.  

I wish our professional nags would be as relentless about reading as they are about telling us what to do.  They would learn that Karl Marx ultimately renounced his abolishment of private property rights.  They would discover that FDR’s Treasury Secretary admitted his Keynesian New Deal economics failed.  They would appreciate that the horrors of socialism described by Hayek and Rand were not theorized, but observed first-hand.  

They might also notice that the socialist Europe they fantasize over is insolvent, that 30 blue states are bankrupt, that 100 cities are about to default on $2 trillion in municipal bonds, and that the re-financing of the 2009 mortgage bailouts is about to begin at 150 points higher interest, spurring another round of foreclosures and declining property values.  They might be aware that China and Russia dropped the U.S. Dollar as bi-lateral trade currency – other nations are not waiting around for us to End The Fed, they are taking matters into their own hands. 

But the relentless socialist Chuckies have no time for reading and contemplation; they are too busy lining pockets, banning happiness, taking choice away, legislating conformance, forcing compliance, pandering to voting blocks, manipulating markets, extending foreign occupations, bankrupting the nation, suing the states, stamping out liberty, and congratulating themselves for all the fine work they have done since taking the reigns of Congress in 2007. 

But they know better.  Perhaps the President’s most telling executive branch edict was the quiet decision by the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently to modify the unemployment rate calculation, extending the length of time that unemployed people are still considered in the labor force from two years to five. Don’t think they don’t know what lies in store for us. They know.

Their recession is relentless, their assault on our liberties is relentless, their foreign interventions are relentless, and their lust for power is relentless.  This month a whole crop of newly elected representatives will get the chance to stop them; I sincerely hope they will succeed, not succumb.    

   

“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 and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”