The Myth of a Conservative Theocracy

The pigs are not who the media says they are.

I have no interest in a Theocracy. It's odd that so many who fear that conservative persons of faith want to establish some sort of church-run government (which is not true) and yet want to tell me how Jesus would run the nation if he were in charge (which is always some complete Marxist fantasy). All I care about is whether the government is going to abide by the First Amendment and allow me to worship as I please, assemble as I please, say what I want to say, print what I want to print and believe what I want to believe. I've only heard one party boo God at their convention. I have never had a Republican say that I could not speak openly about my faith in the public square or teach my children in a parochial school setting or challenge my right to hang up a Christmas wreath in front of my store.

We are promised freedom of religion, not required to be atheists protected by some kind of misguided freedom from religion imperative to be enforced by government. Government, constitutionally, has no say in how or where I practice my religion. It cannot stop me or a group of us who agree to do so, from offering a prayer in the public square or invoking God's name when we speak. The constitution merely says the government cannot force you to worship in my church or any church. If some of my Democrat friends had their way, I would be forced by government, as Russians were by the Soviet Union, to worship at the altar of atheism.Now THAT would be a violation of my first amendment rights.

We're treated to propaganda constantly that says evil right wing Christian corporations are going to pollute the world and then when it collapses, we'll use the ensuing chaos to seize power. We Christians just can't wait to oppress the masses, exploit women like cattle, brutally murder anyone who disagrees, and cover it all up in religion sauce.  Don't believe me?  Watch a couple of episodes of "The Handmaids Tale" on Hulu. It won Emmy's last year for tarring Christians with a Stalinesque brush. The very methods by which socialism murdered hundreds of millions of human beings in the 20th century are portrayed as something that Christian Conservatives just can't wait to get enough power to do. Leftists use this propaganda technique to hide their own sins. Even Hitler, a socialist to the core who claimed he had a better more efficient form of socialism is supposed to be a model of unbridled Christian conservatism even though he  was a vegetarian, environmentalist who was spiritual, not religious by his own claims. It's the old "I am rubber, you are glue!" tactic from second grade on an international level.

And let me make this clear - Christians despise greed as much as anyone. It's the tenth commandment on that stone tablet leftists have removed from public grounds. One cannot enforce standards against greediness by creating enough government power to protect greed. In a free-market capitalist economic system, greedy people who don't give their customers value for their money, who obstruct free trade and attempt to manipulate the system are punished in three ways. 

1. Customers stop buying their products and they stop making money and the whole bloated edifice collapses.
2. The free market and government fair trade laws punish them for their greed and mismanagement through fines, jail terms and bad bad PR.
3. If they behave criminally, then they get sued or arrested and the law steps in.

When Bears Stern and Morgan Stanley went nearly bust back in 2008-9, George W. Bush, whom I liked as a wartime president, messed up when he agreed with the Democrat Congress to bail them out with taxpayer money. Obama doubled down on it. If Bush had allowed them to collapse, small businesses and entrepreneurs would have stepped in to fill the gap and, while the economy might have taken a hit, it would have bounced back. That is if we hadn't elected a Democrat who, like FDR, hadn't meddled with the economy. The result was an 8 year recession. For many of us it was an 8 year full blown depression.

When we don't allow natural consequences to happen to these greedy people running some of the big corporations, when we protect them by bailing them out, we punish rank and file Americans to prop up bad business practices and greed. AIG should have failed along with all the rest of them. Someone leaner, faster and harder working companies would have stepped in to take over the market abandoned by these bloated behemoths. 

And contrary to the media's narrative, it wasn't conservatives that protected greedy executives' multi-million dollar bonuses and golden parachutes. It was government bailouts demanded by Democrats and Republicans who were in no way shape or form conservatives. Give me a Democrat who is a free market capitalist and I'll vote for him over any Republican who is in the tank for corporate interests. 

Unfortunately, these days when I look at the two parties, I that see one of 'em is by and large way deeper into the corporate pig trough than the other and it's name doesn't start with an R. That doesn't mean Republicans are without sin, but at least some of them are in favor of reducing the size and scope of government power. On the left side of the aisle, I can't find a single one anymore. On the right side of the aisle, it's easier to hold their feet to the fire.

Just sayin',

© 2018 by Tom King

Government Needs an Occasional Vacation

Every time a Ted Cruz, Mike Lee or Michelle Bachman, Louis Gohmert or Marsha Blackburn dig their heels in on a point of principle (always over budget over-spending) and threaten to shut down the government, the media reacts like Chicken Little, running around proclaiming the imminent falling of the skies. But is the sky about to collapse on us if the government is forced to take a little vay-cay? How much does it hurt us if government takes a little break. It's not like they couldn't send out some social security checks during the interim. They have plenty of our money sitting in the bank with which to do that and computers to release the cash. So what's the big deal if we take a holiday from spending like drunken sailors?

Actually I should apologize to drunken sailors for that one. The government spends at a rate that would make a drunken sailor verklempt. 

I've read the reports in the New York Times and the Huffing and Puffington Post castigating Republicans for the damage their brinksmanship has done to the economy. They cite a minuscule, six-tenths of a percentage drop in the Federal Reserves anticipated "growth" rate for the economy. Remember, the president can cause that big a drop just by making another one of his speeches and mentioning the word "collective" a couple of times. That economic impact of .6% doesn't mean much more than that a few nervous stock speculators saw their stock prices drop a little because other nervous stock speculators decided they didn't want to pay that much for those over-priced stocks. Some of these financial gamblers lost a little perceived value for their stocks, but if they played it smart and hung on to their stocks, most of these stock prices came back up after a while (see headline below). Standard and Poor meanwhile, worried that the shutdown of 2013 might "weigh on consumer confidence, especially among government workers that were furloughed.”

So, let me get this straight, the government shutdown worried mostly government workers? Standard and Poor tries to bring the rest of us in on it, again weighing in with a moan that, “If people (i.e. government workers) are afraid that the government policy brinkmanship will resurface again, and with it the risk of another shutdown or worse, they’ll remain afraid to open up their checkbooks.”

So, just perhaps, a shutdown might cause people to actually save some of their money instead of spending it, if only for a while. If you are one of those poor simple people who think that everybody being a little frugal and putting some money back for a rainy day is a good thing, you will find that the liberal media finds your attitude unprogressive in the worst way. People sitting on their money is something  the imminent liberal economist, John Maynard Keynes, was always terrified of, as are his progressive acolytes almost a century later. The reason Keynesians like Democrats and even, sad to say, like some Republicans fear a reduction in spending is that Keynesian economic model depends on people spending steadily and paying lots of taxes, so that governments can afford to meddle in the economy, ostensibly to keep the economy stable. If people are left to their own economic devices, Keynes posits that things will be "very bad". Theoretically, a government shutdown should do serious damage to the economy if you buy into Keynesian economics.

Turns out, though, that when the talking heads and government agencies tot up the "damage" caused by the sixteen day 2013 shutdown, they figure it cost the economy around $21 billion. Sounds terrible right?  In describing the impact, however, they mention casually (hoping you don't notice) that during the shutdown, the government didn't spend 10 billion dollars a week. Let's see. Let me add that up in my head. That works out to a little over 1.42 billion per day. Multiply by 16 days and you get around 22.8 billion dollars the government didn't spend. That's a bit more than 21 billion in taxpayer dollars that the government was unable to spend during the shutdown (you can't keep them from spending altogether so they did manage to apparently spend at least 1.8 billion dollars somehow.

And when it was all said and done,  in 2013, right after the terrible 16 day government shutdown in October, the world went on spending and doing business quite well on its own. Some might argue that the economy bounced back nicely, perhaps with even more vigor from having had the government monkey off their back for 16 days.The CNBC (decidedly not a conservative media outlet) led it's 2013  annual year-end report with this headline:

Wall Street closes 2013 at records;
Best year in 16 for Standard and Poor, 18 for Dow

 I think someone on Wall Street should have sent thank you cards to Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Michelle Bachman, Louis Gohmert, Marsha Blackburn and the rest of those terrible Tea Party people.  What do you want to bet that they didn't? So Ronald Reagan seems to have been correct when he told Johnny Carson we could send the government away for 3 weeks and not notice. Of course you don't shut down the essential stuff like the military and the air traffic controllers and such. You only send off the "nonessential" personnel.

Listen to that again. You only send off the "nonessential" personnel and shut down nonessential services during a government shutdown. Apparently those "nonessential" personnel are costing you and me 10 billion dollars a week. Does it occur to anyone else that we might could find a few things to trim from our budget since they are already neatly categorized into the "nonessential" category.

I'm living on a fixed budget, with bad knees and a disabled family member to care for. My personal budget is pretty much limited to essentials these days. I understand about making do without some nonessentials and getting creative with my spending. Shouldn't our government be at least a little more careful about nonessential spending? Doing so doesn't seem to harm our robust, still semi-free market economy. I think we might be able to adapt to a little frugality. We could start by putting the savings back into social security from which the Congress has been stealing for years.

This election cycle we have two candidates for "Dear Leader" lined up, both of whom are very fond of spending ?other people's money" - Clinton the taxpayer's money and Trump* his suckers, uh, investors money.  Hopefully people will at least vote for down ballot conservatives like the Cruz and the rest that I mentioned above. A solid conservative block in Congress would at least have the power to shut the government down, if only for two or three weeks.

I'm with Reagan. Let's send the government on a mandatory three week vacation once in a while, if only to remind some of them that they are, after all, nonessential!

Just sayin'

© 2016 by Tom King

* And before you Trumpians jump on me, you should read Trump's books - especially the part about using other people's money. Trump dearly loves making other people pay for his projects. He used 160 million dollars of George Soros' money to build Trump Towers in Chicago when he ran out of other other people's money.

What Happens If the Lights Go Out in Chicago

Paul Gleiser, in his You Tell Me Texas Blog this morning, warns that Chicago's newly down-graded junk bond rating may be a sign that the Windy City is going the way of Detroit. If Chicago goes bankrupt, we may see a mass exodus of workers, fleeing soaring property taxes. Businesses will flee when operating costs become prohibitive and if businesses go, jobs go away too. Unfortunately, as in the past, an economic collapse in the North often triggers a flood of job-seekers coming to places where they believe the economy is goods and lots of jobs abound........in other words, Texas!

Houston used to be a relatively conservative town until about 1978/79 when an estimated 250,000 people from Detroit moved to Houston over a space of just a couple of years. In that time the population of Detroit declined by a quarter million. At the same time the population of Houston increased by a quarter million. Refugees from Detroit came to Houston looking for work in the oil industry, figuring, I suppose, that they had skills that were transferable and that there must be an oil workers union here.

If you remember, all these people were fleeing due to massive layoffs in the auto industry, the first symptom of Detroit's looming bankruptcy. It was during the Carter years. Gas prices soared. Gas lines and rationing became common and to survive, people sold their big Detroit iron and bought little foreign cars that got good gas mileage. I happened to be living in North Houston at the time. Somebody from Detroit in the radio industry even fled the city. They bought a radio station in Houston and advertised it with..."If you're from Detroit, you've found your station in Houston!" They played lots of Motown.

Detroiters descended on Houston like a plague of job-seeking locusts - whole families piled in cars with everything they could carry, like Okies during the Dust Bowl, rolling the dice that there really were good jobs in Houston.

We had one carload show up on the driveway of our little two-bedroom duplex on Canino Road looking lost and bedraggled. They'd spotted my wife and pulled in to ask if she knew a really cheap hotel. The man had a job interview on Monday and then they were going home to Detroit. They were running out of money fast.

So my wife, faithful Christian that she is, came in the house, told me about the carload of gypsies out front, and then suggested that, since we were going to visit my Grandmother for the weekend anyway (the car was loaded and we were just about to leave), we should let them stay in our house till the poor man could go to his interview.

I always trust my wife in matters of kindness and Christian charity, so I agreed. The poor mother broke down in tears when my wife handed her the key to the house. As we drove to North Texas, I was picturing Yankee carpetbaggers looting our home while we were gone, throwing a party, and generally messing the place up. When we returned, however, the house was neat as a pin and the mother of the family had left a note that was sweet and filled with gratitude.

I don't know if they ever moved to Houston, but it was a symptom of the pre-Reagan era that this kind of wing and a prayer, "They can go to hell, I'm going to Texas," thing happened at all. When progressive socialists rape the economy in the name of grabbing power for themselves, it's always the poor people that they claim to love so much who wind up in desperate circumstances. The man wanted a job. He fled to where he thought he could get one.

One would hope such folk would learn their lesson. Sadly, they seldom do. Look at Houston now after a quarter million Detroit refugees hit the city in the late 70s - electing representatives like Sheila Jackson Lee and pouring out lunacy like water from city hall.

About fifteen years ago, I got into the fight for transit dollars for East Texas. The Houston and Austin area rural transit lobbyists were sucking in millions of dollars a year, while East Texas, the second largest rural transit district recieved less than 4% of Travis County's appropriation and less than 2% of Houston's. The Democrats in those two counties were siphoning from the federal transit budget which was supposed to be apportioned by population. Instead of having the second largest appropriation we had the next to the smallest. We really had to fight to get the legislation through that cleaned up that - fortunately we'd just elected a Republican House and Senate and Governor.

I joke that Houston and Austin is where we store our Democrats in Texas, because if you bunch 'em all up it's easier to keep an eye on them. It's not such a joke anymore and it's going to get worse if Chicago falls. 

What we need to do is figure out some nice nonunion manufacturing businesses we can start up quickly to put all those Yankee refugees to work at.  Because you can bet the flood of Chicago refugees is about to begin. Guys want to work. You can hardly blame them. We should make them join the Republican Party, though. Kind of like signing a loyalty oath - instead of leaving them to gin up some new kind of union that merely reflects the old bad habits they got up to back home; the kind of habit that brought down two of America's wealthiest cities so far and may yet bring down others.

Just one man's opinion,

Tom King
© 2015

Why Private Sector Spending Improves the Economy and Public Sector Spending Doesn't

If, as conservative economists claim, spending by the public and private sector business improves the economy and like the proverbial rising tide, "floats all boats", then why doesn't government spending work the same way?  Surely, somebody out there is earning money from all that government spending.  Let me offer a simplistic example that might, perhaps, help those of us who didn't study economics in college to understand the fatal flaw in the Keynesian model - the economic model all the progressive nations use in determining public spending policies.

Imagine, if you will, it's the early 19th century. You are on a sail-rigged trading vessel off on a trading mission.  A sailing vessel is an immensely complex machine that requires many people with highly developed technical and physical skills to operate.  The captain runs the overall operations. There are navigators, rope-makers, sail-makers, topmen, officers, coopers, surgeons, carpenters and cooks, all working together to get the boat from one place to another with a cargo for sale.  Sell the cargo, the crew gets paid, resupplies itself, repairs its hurts, picks up another cargo and its off again across the sea.

If the ship is well run and no disasters strike it, a ship of this type is a happy ship and a profitable ship. The crew gets back to home port with money for their families, the shipowners make money which they, in turn, spend on new ships, homes, other businesses and on hiring people to work for them.

When fitting out and crewing a ship, the captain is careful not to hire too many people or he will find he has an over-abundance of "idlers", people who are off-duty or "unemployed".  Let's suppose our ship - call her the "USS Progressive" is captained by one of those new enlightened captains.  He has learned by watching that ships which do not flog their crews, treat them fairly and pay them well make more money than the old-fashioned brutal and exploitative trading vessels.  He decides to use the power of his position to make the crew even happier. (Secretly he's been skimming from the ships accounts and made himself rich and now has a big box of gold under his bunk and is terrified that the crew will mutiny and take it from him.) 

So, he skims more off the accounts and starts buying goodies like bonbons and rum for the crew and rewarding them for no particular reason.  He becomes concerned that the idlers might become restless so he hires the larger ones as extra "marines", the captain's law enforcement force. These marines require expensive uniforms and equipment and spend a lot of their time drilling and cleaning their weapons.  Because there are now fewer idlers available when the work picks up, the captain picks up some new idlers at the next port and stuffs them into the crews quarters which is beginning to get crowded. 

Because the idlers are still problematic, he hires any of them who can read to take care of the ship's paperwork.  The ship's paperwork begins to expand dramatically so that soon there are 20 or so "clerks" passing paperwork back and forth, largely generating work for each other and the crew who have to fill out forms and reports on virtually everything they do.  Now the ship has a record of everything that goes on aboard ship, every nail, every foot of rope, every potato in the food locker.  If anyone wants that information it can be delivered right to them after they fill out a form 233/c in triplicate, get it signed by the captain, authorized by the first-mate and submit it to the appropriate clerk who will then perform a file search, collate a report and have it back to you in a week.

The ship is still sailing along relatively efficiently although she recently found herself 200 miles off course because the navigator had neglected to properly file his Form 88-D Change of Course Directive and the Helmsman never received the proper order. The expanding bureaucracy keeps absorbing more idlers, creating even more idlers as ships operations gradually become more and more complex and time-consuming.

As ships operations become more inefficient, there is less to do.  There aren't enough people who aren't busy with paperwork to call on to make course corrections or reset the sails more efficiently so the ship alternately sits becalmed or races along at terrifying speed with all sails set in whatever condition they were before the last Form 777/A Set of Sails Advisory Notice was issued by the seriously overworked First-Mate's clerk.

To keep the ship from being beaten to death, the Captain decides to implement a make-work program for the increasingly mutinous idlers who fear the ship is about to be wrecked or driven under by the wind.  Since the boat is going too fast, the Captain decides that sea anchors should be made to slow the too rapid progress of the ship.  He puts the idlers, who have by now formed a union, to work making sea anchors.  In the interest of fairness he promises to pay them all at bosun's wages.

As the sea anchors are completed, the marines, who, by now outnumber the sailors, deploy the anchors off the stern of the boat, sailors and topmen being busy filling out their quarterly efficiency reports.   The boat slows satisfactorily increasing the ships passage from two months to four.  The ship gently strikes the coast of Guatemala three months later (dragging 33 sea anchors, she didn't have a lot of way on her).  The crew is either dead of starvation or killed in the bloody mutiny that saw the rest of the ship's stores and cargo thrown overboard by the frantic captain who reasoned that if there was nothing left to fight over, the fighting would cease.  He, of course, kept his gold well-hidden.

The ship owners go broke, the village loses a third of its menfolk and a troop of monkeys gets to the gold first and festoon themselves with the most attractive jewelry, thus sparking the legend of the lost tribe of rich and nattily-dressed little people of the Watoon Jungle.

Folks, the Guatemala coast is not that far off.......

© 2013 by Tom King

Disappointment’s Haunting All Their Dreams….

© 2012 by Tom King

 

 

The split screen was unkind to the President.

If Mitt Romney manages to avoid shooting himself in the foot and wins this election, then for a long time after his inauguration is over and done, pundits, political consultants and Democrat true believers will be still shaking their heads and wondering how things went so very, very wrong.

 

After all, they had this guy. They were so certain sure. I mean, how could Obama lose when Mitt Romney had so much going against him?

 

1. He is a Mormon. No self-respecting conservative redneck Christian was ever supposed to vote for a Mormon so that meant he would certainly lose the Christian right?
2. He’s rich. The Occupy Movement was supposed to define Romney as one of the privileged exploiters in the top 1% - something guaranteed to turn the proletariat 99% against him, or so, their Marxist professors assured them.
3. He presided over the creation of a state health care system while he was Massachusetts governor. This should have turned all the hard right fiscal conservatives against him.
4. He was the Republican candidate most diametrically opposed by Ron Paul in the primary. The Paulistas were supposed to reject a Romney nomination and carry Ron Paul on their shoulders into the presidential race as a third party candidate and divide the Republican vote. How could Ron Paul not lust for the presidency so much that he would take the opportunity to bask in all that national attention? Surely he knew he’d have the support of the mainstream media. How could he do something as principled as consider the good of the country over his own ego? Isn’t he a politician after all?
5. He laid off workers as president of Bain Capital. This was supposed to undermine his reputation as a job creator and turn all the unions against him – even the coal miners who could be counted to vote Democrat despite Obama’s anti-coal rhetoric.
6. He’s awfully white. The minority vote was supposed to be solidly against him.

Romney, like McCain before him, was supposed to be a political straw man; an easy target for the charismatic Barak Obama, the emblem of hope and change, the brilliant speaker and the “clean and articulate” black person. Working hand in glove with the mainstream media, the Obama campaign pummeled Romney’s primary opponents for him while smoothing his way to the Republican nomination – even inducing Democrats to vote for Romney in the primary to insure he would be the candidate.

 

In focusing so hard on setting up the Republican Party to lose the 2012 election, President Obama’s handlers failed to notice that the president’s policies were a disaster.

 

1. The new tone from the American president was supposed to send people into the streets around the world to cheer the new and improved United States foreign policy. Even Islamists were supposed to like us. Instead, if anything, things got worse. We’re hated more than ever. Terrorists are hitting us on our own soil again, murdering diplomats and continuing to blow themselves up willy nilly, even though we left Iraq like we were supposed to. 
2. Obama was supposed to save us from the disastrous policies of George W. Bush and save the economy. In reality, the stimulus packages did little for the economy besides give corporate bigwigs a golden parachute and jack up the national debt beyond what anyone can imagine and put us heavily into debt to China, which doesn’t really like us much. Unemployment is higher than any time under President Bush and persisted throughout the Obama administration. The economy is relentlessly bad and small business has pretty much lost hope.
3. Obama was supposed to unite America and end partisanship in a burst of rainbows and unicorns. Instead, the country is more sharply divided along political lines than it has been since 1859 and we all know what started up in 1861. I saw a political cartoon the other day showing a small businessman boarding up his windows “in case Obama is re-elected”. He should probably go ahead and keep them boarded up if Romney is elected. It could get ugly!
4. Obama was supposed to close Gitmo and end the war and stuff. Gitmo is still open; troops in Iraq went from being soldiers to “advisors as though that counts as withdrawing. We’re mired in Afghanistan under rules of engagement reminiscent of those that hamstrung G.I.’s in the Vietnam era. Obama, almost reluctantly and at great personal risk to his political career, ordered Seals to capture Osama(with a “U”) Bin Laden, then saw his staff leak so much information that it compromised the security of intelligence assets, got people arrested and probably more than a few killed. A helicopter full of Seals wound up shot down shortly after the operation. The timing was more than a little troubling.
5. Obama was supposed to give us universal health care and lower the debt in the process. Ironically he did get the bill passed, but the whole “you can’t see what’s in it till we pass it” strategy left Americans deeply suspicious of the bill and rightly so. Reading the bill brought forth a litany of horrors that shocked the economy into inactivity. Homeowners who were supposed to not lose their homes lost them anyway. Small business took cover and stopped creating jobs. Corporate giants chose to sit on their piles of money till the dust settles, if it ever does.
6. Obama was supposed to collapse the economy by overloading the government with entitlement spending. The American economy proved more resilient than Obama advisors Bill Ayers or Frances Fox Piven counted on and the Progressive Millennium did not arise from the ashes of capitalism like it was supposed to.
7. He was supposed to bring true equality and opportunity to all minority Americans. They were supposed to march lock step to the polls because Obama was a man of color like them. In his first term he became a man at odds with the church that the majority of members of one of those “reliable” minorities belong to; a man who is being burned in effigy by mobs of the minority whose schools he attended as a child; a man who has done more to increase the numbers of his own ethnic group who are joining the Republican Party, the tea party and other conservative groups than any president in history; a man on whose watch saw black unemployment rise to almost double the unemployment rate of the general population. Between inflation and falling wages, guess who got hit the hardest by the recession?
8. Finally, the mainstream media was supposed to make this election a walk in the park. Unfortunately for the president, the failures of his administration have left blood in the water and reporters are more closely kin to sharks than sheep. If he looks like he’s losing, the MSM will rush it’s armies of pundits to the nearest microphones and get it on record that they knew Obama was toast long before the election.

The president’s mistake was confusing sheep with sharks, cats with dogs and freeloaders with fans. The media smells blood and circles the source in a feeding frenzy. The almost-feline prides of pundits wander away to look for someplace where they will be better fed and will look more attractive. The mob will turn on him because they expected free housing, free food and their car payments to be covered with cash from the Obama stash. All they got were free cell phones.

 

Seriously, there could be pitchforks!

 

 

Karl Marx Was a Goblin....

Frederic Bastiat called socialism "legalized plunder".  My friend Sophia, apparently an admirer of Karl Marx, disagrees.  She says this: 

• Capital already exists and is already owned. Where did it come from?  It came from labour. All capital is the product of labour, therefore labour has a claim on all capital. It is not abstract means of production that the workers should control but the means which already exist.

The idea that all capital comes from labor seems to swim against the direction that money actually flows.  Capital (or profit) as far as I can see originates when consumers pay for goods and services.  The company uses that income to pay workers.  So if anything, capital comes from consumers and is passed to labor by capitalists.  The fact that labor is also a consumer doesn't change that. AND Management (those greedy old capitalists) are also consumers.

It's like the water cycle. Water evaporates all over the place, collects in clouds which rain on the land watering the fields.  The excess runs off into streams and from there to rivers and on to the ocean where it evaporates again and makes clouds. Money works like that.

Sophia and Karl would have you believe that the economy (the financial water cycle if you will) actually runs  counter to its natural direction. Capital is, they say, stolen from the workers to enrich the wealthy capitalists. Odd that they conveniently leave out consumers in this model, inserting them later when they want to look like populists. Classless society advocates would have you believe we can create a society where consumers deposit money directly into the pockets of labor.  Of course, the pockets of labor are on the other side of the same pair of pants.  When you need some consumer cash again, the worker must transfer money over to their consumer pockets, from whence they transfer the cash back to their labor pockets and so on, ad infinitum.  Of course, this all happens AFTER they've cut out the evil capitalists and eliminated them as large scale consumers and reduced them to pocket-swapping labor and monumentally screws up the economy.

Which confuses me, because they also believe there is an elite group of smart people who by virtue or their great brains, their pure hearts and their unbounded courage can centrally plan all our lives for us and create a utopian society where everybody is the same, no rich, no poor, no war, no religion.  The whole thing is either a John Lennon song or a Wizard of Oz sequel they're going for, I'm not sure which.
The Marxian model seems a classic double bind where two opposing beliefs exist in one man's head and it locks him up so he cannot move forward.  It could explain why liberals seem to be crazy. 

I had the same problem with the goblins of J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter books. The goblins, if you remember, are the bankers of the wizarding world.  They run Gringott's, the wizard's bank. The problem with the goblins is this. They make their living by taking gold from humans and making things for the humans.  They, however, believe that anything they make should revert to the ownership of goblins once the person who holds the object dies.  This makes perfect sense to them.  They made it, so it's theirs.

So what do they do for a living?  The goblins run wizard banks where the wealth and precious objects, many of goblin make, of generations of wizards are stored in highly secure vaults. These vaults, by the goblins own policy, are held to be inviolate, no matter that they believe that much of the treasure that they are protecting is of goblin make and therefore actually belongs to them.  It is a point of pride (and good business policy) that nothing is ever stolen from a Gringott's vault.

They may believe that everything they make still belongs to them in theory, but in practice they know that if they actually took back the things they believed were theirs, their banking and jewelry/weapon-making businesses would shut down. Customers would not keep their things where goblins would take them back so the bank would close. Customers would not order goblin-made items because paying for something wildly expensive that you could not even pass on to your heirs would not make sense to anyone but goblins.  Therefore goblin business rumbles along with a set of beliefs that contradict what they have to do in actual practice in order to keep making a profit off the wizarding world.

It's little wonder that the goblins of Harry Potter are devious, irritable little creatures. There is a conflict between belief and practice within the whole goblin economy that plants the seeds of insanity.  Goblins believe that wealth comes from goblins while in actual practice, goblin wealth, as they well know, comes from gold paid them for goods and services by wizard customers. If humans believed as goblins did, then, since the money collected by goblins, actually comes from humans, humans ought to have a perfect right to take back any money they have paid a goblin for a service or product from them when the goblin dies, since the gold originally came from humans. Goblins would have a real problem with this were wizards to actually try to put such an idea into practice.

Karl Marx had the same problem as the goblins. His philosophy hinges on the belief capital comes from the labor of the working class. At the same time it is obvious that unless the consumer buys those goods and services, labor would receive no capital for its labors.  The accumulation of capital in the hands of a few is supposedly evil.  So how does Marx propose we solve that problem?  By taking all that capital from the hands of those "few" capitalists who accumulated it and giving it to the government "few" to redistribute to labor.  So instead of rich people having control over all the capital, we give it all to bureaucrats.

Goblins if you will.

I could also point to Douglass Adams' Vogons to illustrate the hazards of handing power and money to bureaucrats, but I think the point is made.

Karl Marx is a goblin.  Perhaps that's why he looks devious and cranky in all of his pictures.

Just one man's opinion,

Tom King

Karl Marx Meant Well......

He just didn't know his human race very well.

(c) 2012 by Tom King

Got into a debate with an economist the other day over Marxism vs. Communism. He took a swipe at Ronald Reagan for not understanding that Marxism and Communism are two different things (according to economists). No matter that Marx wrote the Communist Manifest (and yes, Engels helped, but he gave all the credit for the ideas to Marx).  Apparently the pure Marxist ideology is that the ideal worker's paradise should be a virtually leaderless society where the collective makes all the decisions and no strong leader exists.  That is actually an idea a died-in-the-wool capitalist could get behind actually. 

Karl Marx's great difficulty was that he looked to create a heaven on Earth. It was an admirable dream, but it does not work here on this planet. Marx's utopia requires a couple of things that Marx never accepted as necessary.  Marx later got involved with communism because he hoped to work out his worker's paradise in the real world and had, I believed, figured out that some system of authority was essential to make it work, whether he wanted to admit it or not.

The truth is, the ideals behind collectivism only work if all the people in the collective are good and altruistic people. There is no such group of people. The progressive movement still believes there is despite abundant evidence to the contrary. 

I'm pro capitalist because it seems the most effective way to create a healthy economy in a world where  the baseline is greed and self-interest.  We live in a sinful world, let's face it. With capitalism, if you over-extend and get piggish, you fail unless some government decides you're too big to fail and protects your depredations upon the system by bailing you out with tax dollars.

Our problem here is that we are trying to blend two system - one that believes that, if you meet a baseline of needs, people will be basically good and another that believes people are basically bad.  As a Christian, for instance, I believe the latter. I also believe that our experiences here and with the help of God, a goodly number of us will one day achieve that altruistic goodness that Marx mistakenly thought he could bring out in people by sharing the wealth around.

What Marx did not understand was that  free will is a wonderful, but double-edged sword. The communists hoped to somehow control free will and negate its effects. At first they tried through providing everybody's baseline needs as equitably as possible.  When that didn't work, they created the KGB and attempted to create altruism through fear and the gulags - Communisms own brand of hell.

It is tempting to intellectuals to believe that smart leaders can somehow create a centrally planned society where everyone is content if not truly happy.  Even Einstein, as smart as he was, wondered why we couldn't manage it.

The problem is in man's nature.  He does have free will (despite BF Skinner's assurances to the contrary).  He is born with two contrary natures.  The new born child knows how to love without reservation - he loves himself.  Sadly, many children never get far beyond that. It is the work of a lifetime to become a selfless person - the kind of people you absolutely must have in order to maintain Marx's leaderless collective. 

To base a political and economic system on the hope that  somehow you can somehow create rules or provide sufficient bread and circuses to cause people to spontaneously become self-less is an exercise in wishful thinking.

Marx had an admirable goal. It's just not achievable without two things.

1. People who want to be good above all things.
2. An all-knowing, all-caring leader to manage the details.

#1 is, I think, what will occur at the  Second Coming.
#2 I believe, requires the existence of God.

If neither of those elements are in place; if God does not exist, if people people who want to be good are not separated from those who choose to be bad, then we're well and truly hopeless because we're trying to make up flocks of sheep that include hungry wolves as members. Inevitably, this takes a terrible toll on the poor sheep as last century's experiment in Marxist sheep herding clearly demonstrates.

Just one man's opinion,

Tom King

Is Sarah Palin a "Mere" Cheerleader

One of my Facebook sparring partners recently dissed Sarah Palin as a mere cheerleader and unfit to be president. I immediately jumped back to the early 80's in my mind, remembering the incessant criticism of our president by both the left and the "intellectual" right.  Ronald Reagan was also criticized as a "mere" cheerleader if you'll remember.  They said he was an "empty suit", unfit for the intellectual challenges of being president.  My buddy, Dennis had the same criticism of Palin. He wants somebody "smart" to be president.

Well, you know what, I think we could use a cheerleader in the oval office.  How long has it been since we had someone in there who believes in the basis goodness of the American people AND believes in getting the government out of their way is the road to prosperity. I am sick to death of all the so-called "smart" people up in Washington, diddling with the economy, the health care system and our liberties in a futile attempt to plan all our lives out for us.

Even, notorious smart person, Albert Einstein, whom I respect as a scientist, fell victim to the misguided belief that many "smart" people do-- that somehow, smart people should be able to figure out how to run all our lives for us so as to eliminate poverty, want and disease.  He like other smart people over-estimated the capacity of human intelligence to manage something so blindingly complex as an economy, a culture or a vast collection of humans, each with free will and their own self-interest.  No small group of people have the collective brains to manage it.  That's why I believe that the government which governs best, is that which governs least.  

It doesn't take a towering intellect to lead. It takes courage, determination, humility and the willingness to lead from the front by example. We've had too many "smart" people try to micro-manage government. Carter did it. Johnson thought he could do it. Obama is doing it. Clinton, thank goodness, was too busy skirt-chasing to micro-manage and let the Republican congress open up the economy so that individual Americans could get it charged up and going again.

God deliver us from "smart" people. They think entirely too much of their own ability to do all the decision making. I say this as one of the so-called "smart" people (if you go by IQ testing I'm a flippin' genius). I understand as well as anyone that Intellect (with a capital "I") is not everything.  There's a lot more to leadership than book smarts. It took years of study, personal errors in leadership and a careful observance of outstanding leaders like Ronald Reagan, Patton, Eisenhower, Lincoln and Grant for me to learn how best to lead. I learned that great leaders first point the way and then get out of the way so the people can get on with the job. Great leaders delegate. Great leaders don't second guess. They don't micro-manage. They give the broad overview of the plan, then trust their generals, captains, lieutenants and especially their sergeants and privates to carry out those plans.

Obama's great sin is an entirely too great an admiration for his own intellect and a distrust for the collective intelligence of the American people. He trusts himself first, his advisors second and the American people dead last. That's a recipe for poor leadership and a discouraged, disorganized country. Under his "leadership" the American business community is reduced to sitting around on its collective butt, waiting to see what's the next "brilliant" idea that's going to come out of Washington and screw things up further.  Instead of getting up and going forward and making things happen, the very folks who could kick start the economy are keeping low, watching the economic weather. Passivity on the part of the business community will not save our economy, but that is exactly the behavior this administration is encouraging with its incessant micro-managing.

So Palin's lack of intellectual credentials bothers me not at all. Sometimes all we need is a cheerleader. Remember Reagan's "City on a Hill" speech. What was that, if not, cheerleading, but it was an effective technique for rallying the troops and dragging us away from the depression that Jimmy Carter and the Democrats were brewing. As a cheerleader Reagan was brilliant and oh, how the intellectuals whined that he delegated too much authority, that he didn't know "what was really going on". Remember the blistering criticism he took and how the American people paid no attention to it.

When he walked out of the summit in Iceland, the smart people railed that Reagan's "stupid" rejection of cool diplomacy had doomed the world to nuclear annihilation. The next year the Russians came back and the result was the first treaty that actually got missiles pointed at somebody else.

Reagan was called stupid for deploying Pershing missiles in Europe. Next thing you know both the Russians and us were scrapping ICBMs right and left.

The smart people excoriated Reagan for saying "Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall!" out loud and in front of Germans no less. They said it would destabilize Russia and set back relations with the Soviet Union for years. Within just a few years the wall was torn down and the Soviet Union was no more.

Please, I implore the voters of America. If some pundit tells you such and such a candidate is the "smartest" man or woman in America......RUN!

Go straight to the voting booth and vote for his or her opponent!

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King
(c) 2010