Money Trouble

For a capitalist country, we sure don’t know very much about money. 

It takes more dollars these days to buy the same amounts of oil, corn, wheat, copper, gold, silver, vacations, grapes, health care, timber, other currencies, ethanol and gasoline.  And yet we forget about all that other stuff and blame the high gas prices on the oil companies instead of the money monopoly that forces us to use more of their dollars to buy a gallon of gas.         

Any currency is simply a unit of measure.  A dollar is like an inch, a pound, a gallon, or a calorie – it tells us how much of a particular characteristic something has so we can compare it against other things.  In the case of a dollar, that particular thing is value.    

We could just trade our labor for meat and our meat for axes, and our axes for a bag of coal, and so forth, but it is far more convenient to carry money; and using money as a medium of exchange works fine as long we all agree to use it.  The amount of money we need is the based on the amount of tangible things we have, the amount of new things we will produce, and the amount of exchanging we intend to do. 

Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods and services.  While most of us think of inflation only in terms of its visible effect - the rising prices we see – its real cause is the oversupply of currency, as the value of money obeys the law of supply and demand and drops when there is too much of it sloshing around.   

When the Federal Reserve creates too much money, prices rise as measured in dollars, just as everyone’s “height” would rise if the Fed was in charge of inches and created 10% too many of them.  What now takes 71 inches to measure – my height - would require 78 of those 90% value Federal Reserve Inches, but I would not actually be the 6’ 6” tall that the new inflated money said I was.   We are still digging out of the rubble caused by the crash of a housing bubble that fooled us into thinking our 5’ 6” homes had really turned into 6’ 6” ATMs.           

And wealth, like height, cannot be equalized by redistributing the unit of its measure.  If you grow 4 inches and I don’t, the government cannot make us equally tall by creating a bunch more inches and allocating 4 of them to me.   The illusion of being equally tall exists only as long as we both agree to confuse the measuring of height with height itself.  

The reality check comes when we come up against something of intrinsic height like a doorway or each other.  When one of us clunks his noggin and the other is looking up to see what happened and the illusion of equality disappears and we lose our faith in inches as a measurement.   We use the more reliable centimeters instead, and the inch becomes worthless.  Change inches to dollars and centimeters to gold and the “rise” in gold prices in recent years becomes properly understood.       

In our Constitution, Congress is charged with maintaining strict standards of uniformity for all units of measure, including currency.  The Founding Fathers understood the need for reliable money and uniform legal tender to facilitate commerce.  They also understood that sound money constrains government by making it difficult for it to take on debt; debt is how (and often why) countries prosecute foreign wars. 

The Framers protected our speech, our religious expression, our security, and our wealth from the government; their Constitution was the written warning to government not to encroach upon the liberties granted to us by God.  9 of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights tell the government to back off; the 2nd Amendment says, “or else”. 

I used the words protected and was – past tense.  That Constitutional protection of our wealth was removed in 1913 with passage of the 16th amendment, which enabled the government to tax income, and the creation of the Federal Reserve.  As it turns out, those were not very bright things to do.   

The first Federal Reserve Note – the dollar – was redeemable on demand for one ounce of gold.  Today it would take nearly 1,800 of those Federal Reserve Notes to buy that same ounce of gold.  Our currency has been destroyed, the size of government has increased by over 500%, the debt has mushroomed to over $15 trillion, and we have fought eight major foreign wars plus numerous smaller interventions.  This is not progress. 

The phrase “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” has never been so appropriately used as when describing the progressive movement’s anti-Constitutionalist reforms initiated at the turn of the last century.  Fearful of capitalism’s potential for uncomfortable excess, they surrendered our liberty to something guaranteed to be far more excessive - government. 

The love of money is the root of all evil, and nobody loves money as much as a politician hell-bent to spend somebody else’s.  Most people do not view personal liberty, economic liberty, limited government, sound money, prosperity, and peace as all one thing; it’s not taught that way any more in school.  Most people believe – improperly – that our rights can be parsed and dealt away independently.     

Currency inflation is not an accident of nature; the government intentionally monetizes its debt, so it can pay back dollars with dimes.  Last week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testified to Congress that the Obama administration has no other plan to deal with the debt, something we all suspected for years. 

That would be swell if America is its government.  But it’s not; America is its people.  Most Americans will retire on their own savings, and if you have been thrifty and have saved enough dollars upon which to retire comfortably, the idea of your own government turning your own dollars into dimes so it can go even deeper into debt should make you angry.  Your government is stealing your money and it has been for years; Geithner finally ‘fessed up is all.    

When the Federal Reserve arbitrarily sets interest rates at 3-4% under market, it has the same confiscatory effect as taxing interest at a rate of 80%.  Did we vote for an 80% tax on interest?  Did either party run on that – either Democrat or Republican?  Actually they both did; they have been deficit spending for decades now.  Not only does currency inflation diminish the size of our nest eggs, but zero interest rates force us to eat into the principle faster; inflation accelerates the date of destitution to those who live on a fixed income from their own savings. 

42 cents of every dollar the U.S. Government spends is borrowed, and that debt will be “repaid” by devaluing your dollars.  Now that you know, each department, each agency, each program, and each spending proposal from Washington, D.C has a new dimension; it now begs the question, “would I give up my retirement for that?” 

Well, would you? 


“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 Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”     

Deadbeat Dads

There are few things as universally despised as a deadbeat dad.  Creating dependents and then refusing to provide financial support is cruel and irresponsible. 

We expect even the poorest of fathers to pay support for their dependent children, and yet we find no fault with the 49.5% of American households who do not pay any income tax, the major source of financial support for the millions of Americans who have been made dependent on government programs.

If you recall, it was just 18% free riders that were intolerable when it came to government health care – so much so that we had to jettison the Constitution to save the Republic from them with the individual mandate.  Why then do we let 49.5% of Americans channel their inner Timothy Geithner and pay nothing towards all other government programs combined?  Are they necessary or only 50.5% necessary? 

There are 118 million households in this country, and the median household income is roughly $50,000 per year, so the amount of tax revenue raised by a minimum tax – let’s say a paltry Romney-esque 15% - would be around $450 billion. Or to use the 10-year pixie-dust triple-speak of Washington budget geeks, $6 trillion. 

I can hear it now; the argument against taxing those who pay nothing is that they can’t afford it.  Has there been a single deadbeat dad in the history of deadbeatery who has not made that very same argument to the court when it was time to set his child support?  And has a single one of them ever won it?  Never.  Everybody has to pay something.

Imagine if you will that every other car at the drive-thru gets to pass its bill on to the car behind.  How do you think the freeloading happy meal driver in car #1 will respond to the question, “do you want fries with that?”   Sure!  Supersize it!  And pay off my student loans and mortgage and throw in a hot apple pie and a liposuction.  And make that next guy throw another buck into that charity bucket right there – the heartless bastard – there are kids who don’t have enough to eat, you know.  

Is it so difficult to understand why the folks in car #2 – i.e. the 50.5% of us who actually pay income tax - bristle at the notion that we are not paying our “fair share”?  Before a single penny is added to the bill of those who pay tax already, the truly fair thing to do would be to let all the non-payers catch up.  There is nothing stopping them from implementing tax fairness on their own; the IRS accepts overage payments.  

And do you remember that argument from Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren that the rich should happily pay more tax because they benefited from roads and schools and police and such?  Well, don’t the deadbeat 49.5% benefit from those same services?  Why not increase taxes on them, too?  To something greater than zero, for example. 

Or for that matter, doesn’t every charity and tax-exempt advocacy group drive those roads, attend those schools, and call those 911 centers, too?  Why is it that we only guilt-trip on the job creators and people who pay taxes already?  Why is it “fairness” for a smaller and smaller number of taxpayers pay more and more of the taxes?    

The politics of taxation is fundamentally dishonest.  You convince a very large voting block that a very small voting block is freeloading and you make punishing those few deadbeats a moral crusade.  Everybody likes a moral crusade; it makes us feel all moral and stuff.  The favorite bad guys are the rich, because resentment is easily marketed – it is the path of least intellectual resistance. 

What the class warriors conveniently leave out of their tax-the-rich pitch is that it never works, a lesson we learned AGAIN this week from our friends in the U.K.  Last year they increased the top marginal tax rate to 50% - what people in some states here would pay under President Obama’s proposed tax fairness plan – but instead of increasing, revenues dropped.  Duh.   

Surprise, surprise - the rich are moving out, or shielding income, or simply sitting on their money instead of putting it in play where it will be taxed.  When big money sits on the sidelines jobs are not created, and jobs – not government programs – are the answer to poverty.  When you tax the rich you punish the poor. 

It is ironic that liberals who rail against poverty are also the first to demonize the wealthy job creators who eliminate it.  They should spend a little less time regurgitating 100 year old disproved slogans and a little more time acquainting themselves with current income statistics – the Current Population Survey (CPS) for 2010 from the Census Bureau is a pretty good place to start.

Each of the five income quintiles in the U.S. now contains 23.7 million households.  In the poorest fifth, 14.8 million households have zero income earners living in them; in the richest fifth only 722 thousand households have no earners.  Only 1 million of the poorest households have two or more earners, while 17.7 million of the richest households have two or more.  Jobs cure poverty – it is that simple. 

And so do traditional values. Only 4 million of the poorest quintile households are married couple families, while 18.6 million of the richest quintile are married couple families.  This should surprise no one; traditional values only get to be that way if they prove to be beneficial over centuries.  I’m not proposing that government should legislate values, but it can quit being openly hostile to the ones that work – family, faith, freedom, thrift, charity, marriage, work, responsibility, patriotism.  

As much as he would like you to think so, President Obama cannot make you richer, and for that matter neither can Governor Scott Walker. The latest income statistics reinforce the familiar instruction about what to do to avoid poverty and move up from the bottom fifth into the higher income quintiles; and those are things we must do for ourselves: 

Get a job and keep working, get married and stay that way, have children, don’t do drugs, don’t commit crimes, save for retirement, don’t spend more than you earn, pay your taxes, and vote Libertarian. 

Ok, I just made up that last one.  Fair is not when half of us pay a lot for what all of us benefit from; fair is when all of us pay a little so that a limited government can do the few things we cannot do for ourselves.  

“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.

Put the P in GDP

The President’s argument goes like this: since the economy has turned around and unemployment is dropping, he deserves another term.  There are only three things wrong with his line of reasoning: 1) it hasn’t, 2) it isn’t, and 3) he doesn’t.  

Last year’s economic growth rate was a dismal 1.6%, less than half of the growth forecasted by President Obama in his last budget, and much worse than the 3.2% growth reported in 2010.  Inflation was reported by the government at 2.5%, up sharply from 1.4% the year before.  And according to the data published by Shadow Government Statistics – the place to go to find unvarnished economic data - real inflation was 11.2% last year, meaning that the true GDP actually declined by 5.6%. 

And most people by now have figured out that the recent drop in the unemployment rate was a statistical “improvement” brought about by BLS adjusting the labor force baseline. Most independent analysts put the true rate of unemployment and underemployment at over 15%; and even government statistics show a lower percentage of Americans are working today than at any time in the modern era. 

So even using the most favorable numbers to the President, we had less people working, 64% more inflation, and 50% slower economic growth last year than the year before.  Where is my Jim Mora voice, “…second term…did you say, second term?  Playoffs?”  

Coming out of a recession, we would expect growth rates of 5-6%; we need 3.5% growth just to tread water – to create the number of new jobs needed to keep pace with population growth and immigration in this country.  1.6% doesn’t cut it (to say nothing of -5.6%) and blaming Bush or Reagan or Coolidge or Augustus Caesar doesn’t cut it, either.    

The problem with the President’s economic policy isn’t what some previous President did; it is that his economic agenda is based on the faulty premise that debt is productive.  GDP is basically a measure of spending, not a measure of production or productive effort, as its name might suggest.  And all spending is not equal.   

If I borrow $10,000 to dig a hole and then go borrow another $10,000 to fill it back up, I will have added $20,000 to GDP, even though nothing productive was accomplished and I am now saddled with $20,000 of debt.  If the government does it, of course, that hole will cost ten or twenty times more, but you get the concept. 

It is an article of faith to liberals like President Obama that government spending is the key to producing economic growth - I suppose it makes them feel like they are doing something.  The difference between Presidents Obama and Clinton is that President Clinton learned from the mistakes of his first term in time to salvage a chance at a second one.  President Obama has not been so nimble. 

Last year, the federal government’s deficit was nearly 9% of GDP, and yet that enormous amount of fiscal stimulus only produced a 1.7% growth rate.  As I said of the previous year’s deficit, we could have gotten a 9% GDP bounce by just giving the $1.3 trillion to a bunch of monkeys and aiming them towards the banana bin at the Pick-N-Save.  Spending 9 to get less than 2 is more than 7 worse than doing nothing.    

The President said in 2009 that we needed a $1.3 trillion deficit as a fiscal stimulus to revive the economy by 2011.  He has just delivered his 2013 budget request, which contains his fourth consecutive $1.3 trillion deficit.  Now, wait a minute; either the economy has recovered, in which case we don’t need another stimulus, or deficit spending does not work, in which case we do not need another stimulus.      

There are those in government and academia who assure us that government deficits and debt are irrelevant because we enjoy monetary sovereignty, the ability to print as much money as we want.  No, these are not Valley Girls, they are grown ups, and many of them have doctorate degrees and tenure.   

The argument of the monetarists is that until the market rejects our currency or inflation appears, we can – and should - keep running up debt.  The markets, we are told, will signal to us when we have borrowed too much – the dollar will fall, demand for Treasury debt will dry up, interest rates will rise, and so will inflation.  Sounds comforting, but then so does every other bedtime story. 

The problem with their theory is that there is no market, not in any real sense, for U.S. sovereign debt.  The Federal Reserve can print money without repercussion because the Federal Reserve can also buy as much US Treasury debt as necessary to mask said repercussion – the drop in demand for treasuries.  And it is the Federal Reserve that sets interest rates and establishes the official inflation rate – the two things that are supposed to impose “market discipline” on the system. 

The theory of monetary sovereignty is not a good argument for deficits, but it is very good argument against the Federal Reserve.  Yes, I am one of those; and yes, I know we are all wing-nuts.  Go back and read the last paragraph again and tell me we are the loopy ones.       

Speaking of spending some serious amounts of borrowed money…  Last week President Obama and his security detail came to Milwaukee to celebrate a local company bringing 100 jobs back from China.  Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was on hand to greet the President and add a touch of schizophrenia to the occasion – apparently the key to job creation is to get government in and out of the way at the very same time. 

But while he was here, I wish someone would have asked the President if his “green” agenda would lead him to support iron mining in Wisconsin.  It will take a lot of that new Brazilian deep-water oil to lug ore all the way from Argentina to Korea to make steel which then has to be hauled back over here to make one of those locks in Milwaukee that the President came to see.  Those big ships and trains don’t run on Solyndra solar panels, you know.  Check that…nothing runs on Solyndra solar panels.   

If we drilled here, we mined here, and we made things here, all of that activity would be increasing GDP here, increasing tax revenues here, and adding jobs here – right here in America, instead of in Argentina, Brazil, Korea, China, and anywhere-else-but-here.  We need to be our own most-favored nation when it comes to trade. 

The key to fixing our economy is to put the “P” back in GDP, and the way to do that is to let our capitalists save us from our politicians.  Mr. Obama doesn’t seem to get that, but the next guy just might.   
 

 “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 Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”       

Mine It

I grew up there - Ironwood, Michigan.  When we moved into town, the neighbor kids all came around on their bikes and wondered why we were moving in when everyone else was moving out.  We didn’t understand the question; we were just little boys.  

My Dad was a pastor – he had two churches that merged into one as the population of the town dwindled.  In the beginning, the churches were filled and there were lots of dads in the pews.  And then there were less dads and then even less, finally it was mostly grandpas left and just a few dads; a few months after the dads disappeared their families left to join them.  We didn’t understand that either.  

My paper route dropped from 43 customers to 32 in less than a year.  The kid with the adjacent route lost his in consolidation, and I picked up two of his blocks just to keep a critical mass of volume in my business.  The kids who kept our routes were the ones willing to pedal farther for less.  I have three graduate degrees in business that didn’t teach me anything half as valuable.   

The houses across the street were first vacated and then torn town.  I asked my Dad why all my friends were leaving.  He said, “it’s complicated.”  So I asked one of the other dads, and he said, “the unions did it.”   I suppose if I had asked some different dad I would be President of the Steelworkers Union today instead of a libertarian Right To Work guy.  It didn’t seem complicated to me then, and it still doesn’t – unions kill jobs.       

A lot of the dads with skills hit the road when the mines shut down; a lot of those without skills hit the bottle or hit their kids, or hit the missus.  Each successive graduation emptied the town of some more of its young – off to Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, college, or Viet Nam.  Some came back to raise their families, or later to retire. The tough birds stuck it out - hard times conquered by even harder men.  And women.  I admire their perseverance and courage.   

Some of the guys found jobs at the new ski hills, making a few bucks holding chairlifts all day for rich people from the cities and kicking back brandy in the warm-up shack on break.  We locals used to hit them up for a snort and a Camel; we skied better with a package on than the snotty kids did with their new equipment and matching outfits who laughed at our accent.  I couldn’t stand those city kids’ attitude back then, still don’t.    

I think my class of ‘72 had about 240 kids in it; today there are only 218 in the whole high school.  Ironwood kids still go to schools that the mines built almost 100 years ago.  Many live in houses the mines originally built for their employees.  I went to see Dr. Gallo at the mine clinic in Newport Location.  I’ll bet that 99% of the opponents of mining don’t even know what a location is.

Ashland, Anvil. Aurora, Bonnie, Cary, Jessieville, Newport, Norrie, Pabst, Puritan, Yale, Castile, Wico, and the Resettlement – when you asked where something was, people told you the mine location, not the town or address.  “Scoop’s Bar is in Jessieville” means you head for that headshaft and start to look around – Yooper GPS.  There are men in their 90’s in Ironwood that are still “Norrie boys”.  

The neighboring town of Hurley had 102 licensed taverns and a couple dozen off-book joints in its prime and its main street is only 3 blocks long – prosperity is fun.  Today’s wild-oat-sowers have only a couple dozen to choose from, and they think they found Sin City.  In Iron County, Wisconsin, the population has declined by 80% since the mines closed.  I’d like to see Dane county manage through something actually difficult like that; that would knock some of that smug off ‘em.     

At its peak, nearly 19,000 people lived across the river in the tamer city of Ironwood; today less than 16,000 live in all of Gogebic County.  17.6% of them live below the poverty line.  The boom and bust cycle of mining has been smoothed out at bust for almost 50 years.  18 building permits were issued in 2010 - eighteen. 

Mining did not devastate the Gogebic Range; it was the cessation of mining that devastated the Gogebic Range.  If you were there, you know.  Griff was, and Ken, and Lynn, John(s), Paula, Marianne, Frank, JD, Brad, and all my MOC fans from our little mining town who love it as much as I do.  You know.

Half a century later, a proposed new mine in Iron County has met with vitriolic opposition, mostly from white-collar city liberals and largely over the irrational fears of environmental devastation.  It is indeed beautiful in Iron County; anyone who would not be concerned about protecting nature’s magnificence there would be a fool.  But it is precisely that pristine beauty that defeats the extremists’ argument. 

Because that pristine wilderness, the one that we are told will be ruined forever if mining ever returns, is located over the same deposit where 1/3 of the nation’s iron was produced for over seven decades.  255 million tons have been taken from that ground and I would drink from any stream on the range today, just like I did when I was a kid and the mines were running full bore.  We didn’t have bottled water; we had cupped hands.  We didn’t wear helmets, either; and we ate our mom's sandwiches for lunch, and said the pledge of allegiance every single day.  Still standing.     

If mining really will ruin the environment forever, it would already be ruined many times over.  The 80-mile Penokee-Gogebic range was home to 337 mines that operated during the 75 years that they mined iron like it would spoil if we left it in the ground.  Three hundred and thirty seven.        

And now a mining company wants to invest $1.5 billion of its own money to develop one mine – one - on its own land at the southwest end of the Range, creating thousands of jobs in a community which has been economically blighted for decades.  Mine-site construction alone will employ skilled laborers and machinery operators from across the state and the region; we will all learn what a real stimulus feels like.

I know a little about the mining business, although our company does not stand to gain with this particular project. I have indeed seen landscapes around the world that have been ruined forever, and I can tell you that the safest and cleanest mine on the planet is the next one. 

Blocking development of the Gogebic Taconite project will not save our planet; it will merely insure that the tons of ore left in the ground in Wisconsin will be replaced by increased production somewhere much less safe and much less clean.  Little brown people in faraway places will die – that is the victory that mine blockers can celebrate if they succeed in stopping the Iron County mine.     

Eventually, a new iron mine will open, but in some other town.  And the people in that town will prosper, probably people with Chinese names you will find hard to pronounce.  They will get the new schools, new roads, new water treatment plants, new businesses, new churches, and new hospitals that could have come to Iron County, just like they did a century ago. Someone else’s children will get braces, fashion, corrective surgery, or the chance to go to college.  It will not be our children; it will be their children.  We will be jealous of them. 

So I say let’s mine it - let those kids be our kids.  But my opinion about mining iron in Iron County is irrelevant, as is likely yours.  There are only two groups of people who should have any say in the matter: the owners of the property and its mineral rights, and the owners of adjacent properties. 

It is a local issue for a community to decide without interference from lawyers, Madison politicians, and professional obstacles.  The only thing that government can do to bring prosperity to Iron County is to get out of the way and then stay there. 

Everything is made out of something that was either grown or mined.  It all has to come out of the ground somewhere.  It would be a good thing for some of it to come out of the ground in Iron County, Wisconsin. 


“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 Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”     
 

Liberty 101

It starts and ends with one question:  "who owns you?"

If you believe that you are owned by your society, that others are entitled to your person, your property, and your compliance with their beliefs, then your demand of the law is that it limits freedom in order to maximize equality.  

Conversely, if you believe that you own yourself, that you alone are entitled to your person, your property, and your compliance, then your demand of the law is that it protects your rights from those who would limit your freedom.  

This is why we do not get along anymore.  We want different things from the law, from our leaders, from our government, and from each other.  In the first case, the owned person seeks to negotiate the terms of his existence through the passage of laws which bind individuals. In the second case, the free person seeks to keep his liberty non-negotiable through the passage of laws which bind government.   

We call the owned person “socialist” and the self-owned “libertarian”; both are better adjectives than nouns.  One turns to government reflexively to solve all his problems, the other turns against government reflexively, the cause of all of our problems.  Right or left has lost all meaning; up or down, more or less, bigger or smaller – this is the choice we must make regarding government. 

We are a nation divided because the two things are mutually exclusive - liberty and government.  One cannot expand unless the other necessarily contracts; we can be free or we can be governed, but we can not be both at once.  Our government is approaching smothering mass; we must either constrain it or lose ourselves in it.         

In Wisconsin, the socialists are attempting to recall a Governor for passing a law that binds government.  In Washington D.C. an incumbent President faces an uphill re-election bid after passing a law that binds individual choice.  One race is about collective bargaining, and the other collective medicine; two referendums on coercion that will set the trajectory of our liberties for decades.     

In a nation of free people, liberty would defeat government by a crushing margin; coercion is toxic to the self-owned.  But in our nation, polls show both races too close to call - such is the sad state of liberty in 21st century America.  A century of drift away from the Liberty Principle has left the idea of true self-ownership unimaginable to most people.  We have relied on the force of government so long we need to remind ourselves how to live as free people. 

Free people do not engage in coercion; they interact with each other through voluntary exchange. Labor is exchanged for wage, risk is exchanged for profit, property is exchanged for property, compliance is exchanged for reciprocal obligation, and charity is exchanged for self-satisfaction.  Our associations are voluntary, our purchases are voluntary, and our commitments to each other are voluntary.  Our strongest bonds are those freely formed – family, faith, friends, patriotism, civic pride, shared interest, volunteerism – not those codified into law.

The social contract between free persons is based upon value, and the self-owned person values his fellow citizen too highly to take their person or property by force or fraud.  He cherishes his own liberty too much to restrict the liberty of others.  He loves his freedom too much to hate it in others. 

The free person does not take, does not coerce, does not compel by force of law; he persuades, he offers, he cooperates, he engages in reciprocal exchange that can only take place when the transaction benefits both parties. We rely on the law to record our agreements, not to impose upon us the agreements made by others. 

Mandates, prohibitions, subsidies, licenses, and preferences distort the proper workings of free markets, and free enterprise is the only kind that is sustainable.  It is hard to imagine that these fundamental principles upon which our nation was founded – self-ownership, individual liberty, free markets - could now be so misunderstood, so feared and so mistrusted.  But that is where we find ourselves.     

Freedom is hard, and we have become soft.  Living as free persons demands a measure of independence that few willingly undertake; and it demands a measure of tolerance that few of us are willing to give.      

Living free means respecting the freedom of others, and the self-owned must tolerate choices we find morally reprehensible.   We need not approve, endorse, accept, or subsidize reprehensible choices of others, we must simply tolerate them. 

This is a small price to pay, considering the alternative. The state-owned must not only tolerate the morally reprehensible, but must pay for it and be subjugated to it by the force of law.  Every mandate of government violates some citizen’s moral code.  Every penny spent is a penny taken; every prohibition is the denial of choice; every ban is a violation of the right to pursue happiness – a right once viewed as so fundamental it was simply declared without need for justification. 

And yet how do our politicians measure their legacy?  They count the number of laws they passed, the quantity of things they banned, the amount of money they spent, the size of fines they imposed, the level of subsidy they provided, the scope of mandates they imposed.  Those are not the accomplishments of statesmen; they are the meager boasts of common scoundrels. 

This year’s elections are shaping up to be a nationwide referendum on the fundamental question of ownership.  The names will differ, but the choice – liberty or government - will be same.  The important question is not the one you might ask of each candidate but the one you ask of yourself – who owns you?  

From there, the right choice is easy.        


“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 Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”     

Let Lying Dogs Sleep

Do you remember Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak?  He was the rarest of rare birds, a pro-life, pro-gun Democrat who had the stones to stage a Custer’s last stand against the Pelosi/Obama health care bill in 2009.    

And for his trouble, former-Congressman Stupak got himself Custered.  He objected to language in the Patient Protection and Affordability Act – ObamaCare – that would permit abortion funding and force religious charities to fund contraceptive services in contradiction to their beliefs.           

Nancy Pelosi refused to amend the bill’s language to explicitly ban abortion funding and to protect the freedom of religious charities from government mandates.  She mocked opponents’ interpretation of the bill’s language, insisting they were hysterical demagogues too stupid to understand proper legislative phrasing.  

Then-Speaker Pelosi and President Obama assured us that the abortion truce - don’t fund it, don’t ban it, and don’t mandate it – which had held for three decades would not be affected by their health care reform bill.  Let sleeping dogs lie. Problem is, letting sleeping dogs lie only works if lying dogs sleep.  Last week, they woke up. 

If you recall, then-congressman Stupak’s rebellion was put down when President Obama personally assured him that an Executive Order would be issued which would disallow government abortion funding and mandates on religious organizations.  Mr. Stupak returned to the floor of the House from his meeting with the President to vote for the bill, reading a note explaining his flip-flop with all the conviction of a POW apologizing for war crimes while the out-of-frame guns are pointed at his head.

The President’s word of honor did not even make it to the end of Stupak’s successor’s first term; he managed to offend the Church, trample the Constitution, and sully his own character in one single act of stupidity when he broke his promise to Bart and ordered Catholic charities to buy contraceptive services for their employees. 

The most serious problem with the President ordering Catholic hospitals and clinics around is not the abortion part, or the separation of church and state part, or the freedom of religion part, although those are all very serious matters.  No, the danger to the nation arises from the lying part, the arrogance part, the petty emperor part.

It is now clear to all that the language giving the President authority to order a religious charity to act against its own beliefs was in that bill all along; the Democrat leadership lied to us the whole time they said it wasn’t.  They were not afraid of being exposed; they just didn’t care.  They stopped caring about us a long time ago.

It is clear to anyone with a hint of objectivity left in them that the Democratic Party’s liberal elites believe they are smarter than the Founding Fathers, morally superior to the Church, above the law, beyond the Constitution, better than the people they represent, and infallible in their judgments.  In fact, they are none of these things.

They believe a promise to us commoners is non-binding, a petition signature is just ink, and the rules of civil discourse and due process apply to someone else.  They think the ends justify any means when it is their ends in question, that contrary opinion is to be crushed at all costs, that those who still value freedom are the enemies of the state.  They are wrong about all of that, too. 

The Catholic Church should go on strike for a week.  Every poor person that comes to their inner-city hospitals should be sent over the offices of the Democratic Party or the unions that bankroll them. 

There you go, Debbie Wassermann-Shultz and Lena Taylor and Kathleen Falk - you fix ‘em for free this week.  Take that money you have skimmed off the top to rig your elections and use it instead to mend one of those broken persons you claim to speak for.  Shut up and pull a shift yourself instead of just telling someone else what to do. 

Let DNC or one of its ward bosses put the injured kids back together again, since they have all the answers on how to run a charitable clinic.  Or better yet, send the sick and injured over to Planned Parenthood - since they care so much about women’s health and all - and let them tend to women with fevers, or stab wounds, or festering boils.   

Let the SEIU and AFSCME spend their loot patching up the gunshot victims and rat bites for a week; and give the Catholic Church a turn riding in the stretch limos while it buys Rick Santorum ads and pays people to sign recall petitions for Tammy Baldwin. 

Let the Church fill its coffers through automatic payroll withdrawal and direct deposit while the unions have to pass the plate for cash in their hiring halls and teachers’ lounges.  Let the nuns find out how easy it is to be compassionate with someone else’s money in the self-congratulating, arms-length world of liberal do-goodery.    

For a smart guy, President Obama did a really dumb thing picking a fight with a nation of faith over freedom of religion in an election year.  And don’t kid yourself; he poked the whole nation in the eye this time – you don’t have to like religion to love freedom.  

It was dumb to try and sneak abortion funding into the health care reform bill in the first place, dumber yet to pull the pin before his re-election, and dumber still to try to con us with this absurd statement supposed to convey a change of policy on his part after the stuff hit the fan:     

    
“The change would allow religious organizations to refuse to cover contraceptive care. It would also require insurers to offer a plan that does not include contraceptive care in their contracts with nonprofit religious groups. But the insurers would be required to make contraception available free of charge to women anyway.”

What does that even mean?  Did his kids write that in separate rooms?  And is there a single human being on the planet gullible enough to read that and pretend that the President had changed his policy?  Apparently, there is one – Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who said, "We think this is a very workable solution.” 

To what?  

It is a very workable solution to problem of advancing a lying dog agenda, if that’s what she is talking about. Beyond that, the President’s word-juggling means nothing because his word means nothing – just ask Bart Stupak.  

“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 Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”     

Unbeatable

Let’s cut to the chase. 

Gingrich is dropping faster than Bill Clinton’s drawers at an intern convention.  After six years hard at it, Romney has not inspired one single Mitt-bot.  Santorum is everyone’s second choice – he’s the guy that the girl in your home town settled for when the dude that gave her the tingles hopped on his Harley and disappeared out west.  And of course there is my man Ron Paul - interloper from the Peace and Freedom Party, fighting the hate since ’88.  

It would behoove the GOP’s final four to quit field-gutting each other, because the only way that President Obama wins re-election is if disgruntled libertarians, or social conservatives, or establishment republicans, or tea partiers or single-issue activists boycott the winner of the Republican primary contests. 

That five-part coalition of the willing is the unbeatable team; so the answer to Obama is to give each anti-Obama faction the chance to vote for someone who shares their values - on the same ticket.  Which ever faction’s favorite son wins should pick a running mate that the losing factions absolutely adore. 

And my suggestion for that unbeatable ticket is President Ron Paul and Vice President Allen West.  Stop laughing.   

Think about it.  What voter anywhere to the right of Hugo Chavez can't find a good reason to punch the Paul/West chad all the way through with gusto?  To all my conservative friends who say they like Ron Paul on most things but can’t bring themselves to vote for him because of this or that, I say ok, don't vote for him then - vote for his Vice President instead. 

What’s your problem with Ron Paul – that he’s supposedly racist?  Hello, Allen West.  Anti-Israel?  Shalom, Allen West.  Soft on Defense?  Make that Col. West, pal.  Too old?  Allen West, youngster.  Meandering answers? Allen-get-the-hell-out-West.  Appeaser?  Allen-obliterate-them-West.  Too Muslim-tolerant?  Allen-pee-on-‘em-twice-West.  You get the picture.

And to all my libertarian friends who are still breathing into a bag at the thought of Col. West standing next to our icon, I say that I, too, could list a dozen policy disagreements with the conservative Rep. West.  But if conservative Vice President Allen West is what it takes to elect libertarian President Ron Paul, then the Colonel overcomes my lesser objections by the score of 1-12.  As an MOC reader comment recently reminded us – politics isn’t religion, and compromise is not a mortal sin.   

Every poll shows that independents and Democrats will come over to Ron Paul in numbers that no other Republican can match.  Young people, who will set voting patterns for life, flock to the old geezer in droves - and they bring enthusiasm with them.  A Paul-West ticket does not simply motivate a conservative/libertarian base; it pulls voters away from key demographic blocks ceded to Obama by the professional vote-herders.

Seriously, a Paul/West pairing is a 60-40 hammering waiting to happen.  Throw in the re-election Wisconsin of Governor Scott Walker and the taking of the U.S. Senate and the Government Party may never recover.  

Let’s face it - there will be no defeat of President Obama this fall without some serious nose-holding.  This is the reality that is settling in upon all of us who understand that losing the battle for the lesser of two evils this time will mean a lot more evil than normal. 

In Barack Obama’s post-Constitutional America, the idea of a second term without the restraint of a re-election bid drops a Paul/West ticket down to a distant second place in the rankings of the unthinkable.  

What are the alternatives?  A Romney/Gingrich ticket seems less likely with each kick to the groin.  A Ron Paul/Gary Johnson pairing would thrill libertarians but alienate the much larger voting block of conservatives.  Romney/Huntsman locks up the Mormon millionaire vote, but Axlerod wasn’t going to waste a stamp on them anyway.  And Paul/Paul runs the American Chopper risk – waycool junior might upstage the original badass daddy.    

But either Paul or Romney could instantly assemble the unbeatable coalition by adding a rock-star running mate from the losing faction to the ticket.  If the mere thought of Paul/West triggers your vertigo, think about Romney selecting Rand Paul and you will achieve a similar, if far less entertaining, result.  The only purpose of choosing a running mate is to win, and winning back rivals' supporters alienated in this primary fight is the most important decision the GOP nominee will make.  

Conservatives and libertarians agree on the most fundamental of binary political choices – government or liberty – and we need each other to defeat the Government Party, and I mean both its Democrat and Republican franchises.   

The only reason we know what an unlikely pairing Ron Paul and Allen West would be is that they are quite likely the two most honest, straight-talking, principled politicians in the nation.  That alone is the margin of victory when 1/3 of the voters self-identify as independents.  An independent voter is a Republican or Democrat who got tired of playing sucker; honesty is a pretty big deal with us.   

And just imagine the sound bites generated by these two; they would dominate the news every single day of the campaign, neutralizing the President’s single most important advantage – a cheerleading mainstream media.  And the schooling of both incumbents in the fall debates would be simply awesome.  Biden: “I’ve been to Iraq 6 times and…”  West interrupts, “shoot any of ‘em, Joe?  No? Wuss.”   Chris Matthews would pass out and Wolf Blitzer would hurl.  Television worth watching. 

Well, that’s my Dream Team – got a better one?  That’s what the comment section is for, so let’s hear it.


“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 Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”     

My Country 'Tis Of This

Economic statistics can be very confusing, but they can also tell us a lot about the country we live in if they are presented in digestible chunks.  Here is our America according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

312 million people live here
154 million of us want to work.
141 million of us do work
109 million of us work in the private sector
18 million of produce goods
2 million of us produce food

Most people are stunned to learn that only 20 million Americans (6.4%) make, mine, build, or grow things.  And even that is a bit inflated, as many of the jobs in those companies that make things are administrative positions which exist only to provide information to government agencies and assure compliance with regulations.  I can assure you it has been years since I did anything but type, read, and talk, as our welders, assemblers, and machinists will attest.   

While the unemployment rate can be, and is, manipulated by adjustments and assumptions, the better ratio that really matters in assessing the health of our economy is private sector (wealth producing) employment as a percentage of total population.  As we begin 2012, only 34.9% of Americans create the wealth that sustains us all.  And not just us, but a goodly part of the rest of the world, too. 

That is an already dangerously low number that is dropping as baby-boomers retire in record numbers while jobs move offshore and new business creation stagnates for reasons that both halves of our politicians will blame on the other half. 

Those of us above a certain age must constantly remind ourselves that the country we live in today is not the one we grew up in.  The mines are closed, the plants are idle, the farms are mechanized, data is not punch cards, the Constitution is ignored, the Savings & Loans have given way to Payday Loans, most moms work, and the wars don’t seem to end. 

In John F. Kennedy’s Camelot of 1962, government spending on dependency programs – i.e. the safety net – was 28% of the federal budget; last year, it was 70.5%, according to Congressional Budget Office.  And he did not have two wars pushing up on the denominator back then. 

An entire lifetime of government social programs intended to lift up Americans has more than doubled the rate of entrapment.  And not only has the number of people who receive benefits from government grown dramatically in recent decades, but the number of people who pay for them has dropped precipitously.   

312 million people live in the United States
151 million of us pay no federal income tax
67 million of us are in federal dependency programs
29 million of us work for the government
1.2 million serve in the armed forces

67 million plus 31 million makes 98 million of us (less overlap) who depend on taxpayers for some or all of their income.  At 151 million (49.5% of households), the number of us who don’t pay taxes is essentially equal to those who do.  A pretty good answer if your question is why we don’t get along as well as we used to.  At the halftime of my life-to-date (1983), only 14.5% of us paid nothing.   

In the 1960’s, two taxpayers could have a civil disagreement about whether or not the safety net should be increased from 28.5% of federal spending.  We are the old coots who keep wondering what happened to the civility.  

Today, a non-taxpayer calls a taxpayer heartless for balking at adding trillions more to the 70.5% that only the latter pays.  The latter calling the former “deadbeat” (guilty as charged) does not help the situation any either.  And we wonder why the family reunion has become a dreaded event.   

How much is enough?  In constant dollars (adjusted for inflation), government spending per household has risen 162% since 1964.  Federal spending per household is now $29,401 according to Heritage Foundation, and is projected to rise to over $35,000 in less than 10 years.  With a median income of $49,000, that level of federal spending is simply unsustainable.  It is not a political problem; it is math.    

We can’t tax that much, and we can’t borrow that much; the only option left is to inflate the currency and then to hyper-inflate it when inflating it doesn’t work.  Our median income will still be $49,000 but the cost of everything will double and triple and our savings will be eaten up.  Inflating money is the same as stealing it and that's the plan.     

42 cents of every dollar spent by the federal government is now borrowed.  Congressman Paul Ryan’s “extreme right-wing” budget plan does not bring the budget into balance for another 40 years – 40 years! Newt Gingrich called that reckless social engineering; opportunist Debbie Wasserman-Shultz assured old people that they would die if it passed.   

The International Monetary Fund lists the United States as the second-worst country in terms of fiscal trajectory – i.e. the amount of current debt plus the rate at which future debt will be accumulated under current fiscal policies.  The world has no blueprint for the implosion of an economy too-big-to-fail.  When the Roman Empire cratered it ushered in a millennium known as the Dark Ages.  A millennium is incomprehensible to a society who can’t make it a half-hour without checking Facebook.  This is not going to be pretty.  It is not too late to fix it, but you can see too-late from here.   

I hope that you found this informative.  Now go back to following the campaigns of those who think they deserve to be your President and see if any of them appear to know as much as you now do.  And if you find one, then support him like our future depends on it…because it does.


“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 Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”     

Fun Facts

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs reports whose executive summary headlines were not substantiated by underlying data in the studies’ tables.     

Since then, many others have begun to notice the apparent disconnect between headlines and data.  So it is no surprise that a virtual firestorm has erupted over the latest jobs report released by BLS (Employment Situation Summary), which opens with this terrific announcement:  

“Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 243,000 in January, and the unemployment rate decreased to 8.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.”

President Obama quit reading right there and called a press conference.  Mitt Romney quit reading right there and spoke to the media.  Santorum and Gingrich quit reading right there and said Mr. Romney no longer was needed to fix the economy.  The media quit reading right there and ran with the story that Mr. Obama will now surely be re-elected.  Everyone, it seems, quit reading right there. 

Well, not everyone - Ron Paul, I suspect, never read it in the first place, nor did I.  But if you are going to read it, don’t stop right there - because it gets very interesting very quickly if you keep going.  Like a pack of cigarettes, this month’s employment report comes with its own Surgeon General’s warning: 

“Data users are cautioned that these annual population adjustments affect the comparability of household data series over time.”  

Not to be a jerk, but when BLS says employment “rose” in January, they mean rose from December, which is...um…comparing the data series over time.  Just sayin’.  And what adjustments are they talking about?  

“The (benchmark) adjustment increased the estimated size of the civilian non-institutional population in December by 1,510,000, the civilian labor force by 258,000, employment by 216,000, unemployment by 42,000, and persons not in the labor force by 1,252,000.”

Catch that? 216,000 of those 243,000 jobs “created” in January were the result of “benchmark adjustments” - BLS channeling their inner Ben Bernanke and quantitatively easing 1.5 million new fiat people into existence while putting the digital whiteout to 1.2 million other Americans.  Too bad statistical methodologies are not the economy; it would be a lot easier to fix. 

Most Americans don’t care about methodology; we just want to know whether or not actual unemployment was reduced in January.  Here is how BLS itself described the situation for the various categories of the unemployed:

“The number of long-term unemployed was little changed at 5.5 million…the number of persons employed part time for economic reasons, at 8.2 million, changed little in January…2.8 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged…there were 1.1 million discouraged workers in January, little different than a year ago…”

Little-changed, changed-little, essentially-unchanged, and little-different don’t sound like change you can believe in if you are one of those millions hoping for things to change.  The one category that did go down in January was the number of unemployed who lost their jobs since Christmas and could not find new ones – reported at “only” 2.5 million. 

And why does that particular segment improve so suddenly?  Because black unemployment fell by an astounding 14% in January!  Seriously - I told you it would get interesting.  At first I thought NBA, but the lockout ended in December, and it’s really not that many guys.  Hispanics did well too, according to BLS, with a reduction in their unemployment rate that is five times greater than that the 1% improvement for whites. 

So if we are to believe BLS data at face value, then the economy boomed in January because the private sector went on a one-month minority hiring binge unprecedented in all of human history.  Inexplicably, MSNBC did not interrupt their interruptions to inform us that racism has ended. 

What do you think about that, Milwaukee – are the good times rolling on North Avenue?  Are you buying what BLS is selling?  It sure doesn’t feel like black unemployment fell sharply in January, and that is definitely not what they were talking about on the local Sunday talk shows yesterday.       

Which brings us back to why BLS specifically warned us not to take those 243,000 new jobs to the bank – the economy didn’t actually recover.  They simply adjusted their benchmarks, whatever the heck that means, and the resulting statistical windfall, for reasons none of us could possibly understand, fell disproportionately to the computations of unemployment rates for minorities.    

But that still leaves a gain of 27,000 non-benchmark-adjusted new jobs; that’s a good thing, right?  The BLS tells what to make of the number in their methodology disclosure:    

“…the 90-percent confidence interval for the monthly change in unemployment as measured by the household survey is about +/- 280,000…the threshold for a statistically significant change in the household survey is about 400,000.”

In layman’s terms, disregard. 

Politicians and their supporters should take extreme caution when using BLS data to take credit for job creation or assign blame for job loss.  Using statistical forecasting methods to estimate past employment is a strange way to count jobs anyway.  For the life of me I don’t know why the government relies on phone surveys instead of compiling employment data from IRS records. Every time someone is hired or terminated the IRS is notified; we don’t need to guess about it. 

But the silver lining in all this is that I learned something new.  So after benchmark-adjusting myself, I can report with a 90% confidence interval of +/- 120, that I lost 60 pounds in January.  Sure beats working out…


“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 Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”       

Race For The Cure

What the hell was that? 

As best as I can determine, Susan G. Komen Foundation de-friended Planned Parenthood so PP went berserk and blamed Sarah Palin on Twitter and said they did mammograms but no they don’t but yes they will maybe so SGKF said they changed their mind but no they didn’t not really well sort of…so nobody won a race and nobody cured a thing but Nancy Pelosi crawled out of the crypt to call it a victory for women and a great day to have an abortion.  A joint press release clarified the situation as it now stands:        

OMG U R so not BFF now, K???  :( 

Not to be outdone by all that drama, a previously unknown whiter than white-bread Congressman just one shade darker than clear whose name is not important enough to remember took it upon himself to speak for all black people and decree that Congressman Allen West was not really black because he did not talk like one.  Prompting Snoop Dogg to endorse Ron Paul, which meant new marching orders for us Paul-bots were radioed in through our fillings and now we have to learn to speak Compton.   

True dat.  Fo’ shizzle my frizzle.  T-Doc in the house.  Word to your pennnn…pal.  Street.  I’ve been practicing with Rosetta Stone software - learn your next language like you did your first, starting with mommy’s cuss words.       

With the blacks and women already taken and the Occupiers breaking things again, President Obama went platinum and spoke for Jesus - claiming the Lord told him to tax the be-himself out of rich people, especially those rich sandy beaches who don’t give their ex-husband’s money to Planned Parenthood.  No word yet if Jesus weighed in on 9-9-9.       

Upstaging the President and Jesus, Donald Trump had to eat a mike, too; first announcing he would endorse Newt Gingrich, then a day later Mitt Romney, because Newt is a flop-flipper while Romney is a flip-flopper and we can’t risk the former when we so desperately need the latter and as nicknames go, Mitt is not nearly as lame as Newt plus Mitt has way better hair.  Romney celebrated by agreeing that President Obama made the economy better when BLS made 1.2 million people disappear.  Probably that new NDAA thing we were told not to worry about.

But back to Susan G. Komen…and forget about firing up the abortion debate all over again, this is all about raw power and big money, not tiny babies.  Here is what I want to know: what is it about liberals that make them think they are entitled to everyone else’s money? 

No, seriously - what kind of mental short-circuit makes a person think that if you can’t take enough taxpayer money to buy all the votes you want to buy and perform all the abortions you want to perform that you are entitled to skim the rest from a cancer charity?  At what point does your natural skin-crawl instinct get numbed permanently?     

And what hole in the soul provides the space for all of the gall it takes to bully and threaten a cancer charity – a cancer charity for crying out loud - when they decide to direct the money that people donated to cure cancer to someone who actually tries to cure cancer?  Shaking down cancer charities to generate more abortion profits – that is very, very messed up.       

I know how to give money to Planned Parenthood if I choose to, and I don’t choose to.  Nobody’s business why; it is a personal choice - liberty in practice.  And I also choose to give money to cancer charities, including Susan G. Komen Foundation – that is also liberty in practice.  I walked the lakefront last year for SGKF, not for Planned Parenthood.  Me and tens of thousands of others.    

The exercise of my liberty is not a defeat for women; it is a defeat for women like Nancy Pelosi.  Brutes who think they have a divine right to rule; egomaniacs who have the audacity to claim they are speaking for half of the human beings on the planet every time their mouth opens and a sound comes tumbling out.          

She doesn’t.  In a 2009 Gallup poll, only 26% of women responded that abortion should be legal under any circumstance – the pro-choice, Planned Parenthood, Nancy Pelosi position.  One would hope that most, if not all, of those 26% of women would agree that money given to cure breast cancer should be used for that purpose.  

And I pray that none of those women fall victim to cancer and succumb because money that should have been used to discover the cure was diverted to Planned Parenthood and plowed into Ms. Pelosi’s campaign coffers.  That would add injury to insult.

So how many women “won” when Susan G. Komen Foundation got flattened by Planned Parenthood and Nancy Pelosi?  One.  Nancy won.  There’s your week in review.      

“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 Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”     

Recall The Recall

It started with the pay cut, and when that didn’t fly they changed to losing collective bargaining rights, and when that fell on deaf ears they claimed the sky would most certainly fall, and when it didn’t they made one last tweak and claimed that it wasn’t necessarily what Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker did that justified a recall, it’s just that he went about it the wrong way.       

They would have been better off just bitching about the pay cut. 

Because if this is going to be an election about due process, then Walker’s opponents might as well call it quits right now and recall their recall.  To independent Wisconsinites who live outside the obsessive-compulsive binary world of partisan Madison politics, the way in which the unionists’ recall process has rolled out makes Walker’s parliamentary procedures of a year ago look positively sacramental.   

The state’s Government Accountability Board (GAB) has started to release the recall petitions, leaving it up to the individual campaigns (State Senators, Governor and Lt. Governor) to challenge the validity of signatures that GAB should have disqualified.  A grass-roots army of citizen volunteers turned out to take on that task and even the most cynical of political observers are stunned by the amount of fraud that has been discovered by a cursory review of the forms.        

So far, we have seen duplicate signatures, commercial addresses listed as domiciles, non-existent addresses, residency outside the district, residency outside the state, residency outside the country, and residency outside the galaxy - E.T. apparently wants Walker gone, too.   

And these are the signatures that the Democrats certified and the GAB accepted.  Hard to imagine what you have to do to get one tossed.

We have seen signatures with no date, dates that are too early, dates that are too late, dates crossed out and changed later by someone else.  For folks who demanded a court overturn Act 10 over the number of minutes of notice given before a legislative committee hearing, the Walker-stalkers sure don’t mind giving themselves a wide berth when it comes to telling time.    

We have seen circulators fill in information for petitioners, mask the name of the person being recalled, certify before the start date, certify known fraudulent signatures, forge signatures themselves, bribe petitioners, entice underage petitioners, and fail to complete their own circulator information as required by law.   

We have seen that some people apparently don’t know where they live.  Some people don’t know how to spell the names of their towns.  Some people don’t know how to spell their own names.  Some people forgot they signed already and signed again on the very next line.  Some signed other people’s names multiple times on multiple petitions. 

This is not what democracy looks like; this is what identity theft, voter fraud, and forgery look like.      

One guy bragged on Facebook that he signed 81 times.  Another admitted signing for her whole family, because they shouldn’t like Walker.  Some people didn’t know, or care, who they were even recalling. Some people don’t know which senate district they live in.  And some people have an impressive gift for mimicking the handwriting of the person above them, and above them, and above them. 

The salient point here is not that some people are incapable of filling out a simple form; it is the chilling realization that these are the chuckheads who want to tell us what to eat, drink, drive, smoke, wear, earn, keep, carry, buy, own, sell, listen to, learn, and read.   

Call me belligerent, but I don’t want my life regulated by some doofus who lives in Oconomowoc and can’t even spell it.  Somebody should check the petitions from King and Rio and see if the circulators shipped in from Kentucky and Ohio had an easier time of it with only one or two syllables to master.

And spare me your righteous indignation, liberals – “how” matters because you made it your pitch to independents. Honestly, did you really think you would pull this off?  Did you imagine that the people who outnumbered you to elect Governor Walker in the first place would just sit idly by and let you just nullify their votes when you are high-fiving your felonies on Facebook?   C’mon man!   

And do you really expect us to believe that so many of your experienced circulators all went rogue on you all at the same time in this one petition drive?  That they weren’t just doing what they have always done, the way they were taught by your community organizers?  What possible explanation can you give us now that we understand why you panicked over the Republicans’ Voter ID bill?     

As of this writing, not one Democrat mouthpiece in the state has come forward to denounce the blatant fraud that has been published by GAB for all to see. Not one.  How hard would it be for any one of the opposition candidates seeking our vote for Governor to simply say “falsifying information on the recall petitions is wrong, and I condemn voter fraud.”   

Apparently it is damn hard, even if there is just a small fraction of signatures that are invalid.  One by one, the Democrats most potent opponents are dropping out of contention, as they catch a whiff of the stink rising up from this whole rotten recall mess.  Do the guys running the show not think we independents know why the smart ones – Feingold, Barrett, Obey, Cullen – want no part of it?       

The average Wisconsinite is a fair-minded, common sense, decent, hard-working sort who is ashamed of dishonest behavior like this.  We are the state known for bringing transparency and reform to the political process.  Voter fraud is the kind of low-rent knuckle-dragging thuggery they do in Illinois; it is one of the reasons we call them FIBs - and that does not stand for our Fabulous Illinois Brethren.

Wisconsin Democrats, you’re busted.  You know it.  Everybody knows it.  You boasted that you have one million valid signatures to recall Governor Scott Walker – if you fall short, you will have one hell of a lot of explaining to do.  And based upon the petitions we have seen so far, you best get somebody working on that explanation right now.      

“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 Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”