The Bill of Rights: Does It Really Grant Only "Negative Liberties"

(c) 2012 by Tom King



"That government is best which governs least"
- Henry David Thoreau

 It's wonderful how my liberal buddies descend to name-calling after only a few exchanges when they discover that you don't buy their ideas. I got into an argument yesterday with a guy who follows my blog (though why I don't know since I irritate him so much).

He objected to two things.  The first was my contention that people with money are the primary job creators (the investor-centric view).  He contends it's consumer demand that creates jobs (the worker-centric view).

While I agree that consumer demand does play a role in creating jobs, I'd qualify that by saying consumers only demand things when they can afford to buy them.  And they can't afford to buy things unless they have a job. It's kind of the chicken or the egg argument and there are two basic philosophies as to how to address the creation of jobs:

• One says the government should take away money from the rich (and upper middle class), give (after taking its cut) the money to the poor and middle class (the poor mostly) and then the poor and middle class will spontaneously create demand for goods and services which will be a good thing for everybody.

• The other philosophy says, investors watch trends in markets and invest money in meeting consumer demands as they happen, thus creating industry and jobs on the chance of being rewarded for that investment with obscene profits which will be a good thing for everybody.

The gaping hole in the first system is that it treats wealth as a magical bottomless pit that it can draw from without consequences.  Without the profit incentive (say if we go back to taxing 75-90% of income from the "wealthy" as we did during the failed war on poverty of the 60s) investors do not make risky investments - the kind that result in the creation of companies and jobs and new industry. And you get the malaise of the 70s where people just give up because no matter how hard they work, the tax man is going to take it away. I lived in the 70s. I was a school teacher and nearly everybody felt that way - so much so that the president made a speech telling us to stop feeling malaiseful and everything would be fine. It wasn't until Reagan lowered taxes and gave business an incentive to get off its duff and make some money that the malaise went away.

I did better under Reagan and I was working in the nonprofit sector. Yes wages didn't skyrocket during the Reagan recovery. That's true. But then neither did our cost of living. When you got a raise, it wasn't eaten up at the grocery store.  Wages didn't skyrocket under Carter either, but we also had double digit inflation that pretty much robbed us of what little we were making. I vividly remember the shortages under Nixon's price controls and Carter's gas lines. The Great Society didn't look so great anymore.

But my progressive buddies like to pretend those things never happened because they don't fit their ideology. In the 60s we were going after those richy rich dollars and had all kinds of government programs. Everything must have been just great!  We were giving away sooooo many food stamps after all.

Ever applied for food stamps? I did back then - a miserable, humiliating process. I'd rather get up and go to work every day and I did. At 5 am every weekday I road a bike five miles each way in the dark on rural roads dodging dogs and rattlesnakes to catch a converted school bus and ride 45 miles one way to work at miserable grinding work building a nuclear power plant (riding past liberal protesters at the gate every day who wanted to shut the project down). I clawed my way out of poverty, but I had to get off all those helpful government programs in order to do it. I couldn't keep up with the paperwork and work full time too. And as soon as I went to work I lost wll those helpful benefits anyway. I was fortunate to find a nonunion job working for Haliburton's Brown and Root. My wife was pregnant. B&R paid for my wife's childbirth even though I'd only been working for them for a month.

I believe in the private sector because I've seen the kind of charity delivered by both it and government. The welfare system seems designed to keep the poor in their place. When I escaped it, I was able to pull myself out of poverty. It was hard. I drove a cab 18 hours a day, worked 50 to 60 hours a week during the early 80s till my wife and I finally started our own business out of our home. We ran it till it failed (free government preschool forced us out of our niche market).  We worked 25 more years in the nonprofit sector, started 5 nonprofit organizations and worked our butts off just to stay afloat. We have no retirement, no pension, no savings. I plan to work till I drop over dead and hope in the years I have left to still get ahead by my own efforts.

And if I do finally take a risk that pays off, I don't want to see the president standing there on TV telling me somebody else made my success for me and demanding 75% of my income because I have "more than my share."

Government is historically the most greedy, oppressive, cruel and heartless organization man has ever come up with.  And don't tell me the church is worse, because the church at its worst was only ever a government in priestly robes and no true church at all.  Even the US government, arguably the most benign in history, has a stark record of committing a whole host of outrages. It has only been kept in check from even worse brutalities by the limitations imposed on it by the US Constitution. And my liberal friends want to remove those limitations and thrust more power into the hands of the government.  That's just insane to me!

My friend argued that Obama didn't make up the idea that the Bill of Rights was a charter of negative liberties - as though that made it a better idea somehow.  Of course Obama didn't make up the idea of "negative liberties". The man hasn't an original thought in his head. He's serving as a tool to other masters, a figurehead to be used in a massive power grab by progressives, his way paved by others. In Obama's case his success is truly not his own. Others did that for him. And I do not think I trust those people with my liberties and my liberties are positive.

I can see how the bill of rights could be considered negative liberties. They are negative liberties for the government.

1. The government doesn't have the liberty to prevent me from speaking.
2. The government doesn't have the liberty to prevent me from worshiping as I please.
3. The government doesn't have the liberty to take away my means to defend myself and my home.
4. The government doesn't have the liberty to keep me from meetin where I please and with whom I wish.
5. The government doesn't have the liberty to prevent me from writing and publishing what I wish. 
6. The government doesn't have the liberty to take away my life or liberty without due process.

In that respect I agree, they are "negative" liberties.  So what's Obama's point?  Is he looking for a bill of rights outlining the government's rights. What a horror that would be!
 
CS Lewis memorably said this and it's worth resaying, "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."


Tom

Do We Need A Second Bill of Rights?

Myself, I Like the First One Better

(c) 2012

I received an invitation from a friend in the Occupy movement to sign a bi-partisan "petition" to "Refocus National Debate on Economic Opportunity and Middle-Class Rights" 


So, I check out the website and lo and behold, to my great surprise, the whole deal was organized by AFL-CIO president, Richard Trumka, with the object of, as he put it, " insisting that the power structure in America pay attention to the needs of the men and women whose labor drives this country." This "petition" is linked to something called "America's Second Bill of Rights", which we are also invited to endorse.

So, I read the petition and the "Second Bill of Rights".  While as a conservative I share the concern for providing economic opportunity in America for all people, I disagree profoundly, however, with what lies buried in the fine language of these two documents.  There is a poison pill in them that makes these petitions anything but bipartisan.. 

The original bill of rights is a document which limits the power of government to interfere with the ability of its citizens to speak assemble, worship, write, conduct business and defend themselves. The president has called it a bill of "negative liberties" in that it tells the government what it cannot do. He does not like this. President Obama has called for a bill of positive rights that tell the government what it "must do".

This so-called second bill of rights, seems just what the president had in mind in that it instructs the government to provide a basic level of employment, education, health care, access to collective bargaining, voting and retirement to everyone whether they want it or not. 

The first bill of rights says the government can't interfere with you doing what you want to do.  This second "bill of rights" says the government must give you certain things whether you want those or even stir yourself to work for those things.  The documents my friend wanted me to sign are a baseline socialist model for the US government.

The document practically ossifies the social structure in America into a ruling class and a working class proletariat.  Those who have a position in the ruling class will continue to have that position. Rather than creating a classless society, this unionized vision of America will create just two classes - workers and their rulers.  Those of us in the lower ranks of the working class will all be smoothed out and leveled so that we share a common level of misery with the other workers with precious little opportunity to rise above the pack and achieve success.  In socialist systems, workers bees never become queen bees.

What is hidden in the pretty language is a surrender of our freedom to pursue economic opportunity. In exchange we receive from the government, a guaranteed job, retirement, health care and union membership.  I'd personally like to have something rather better than a guaranteed job, government health care or a union pension. 

This scheme of guaranteeing a minimum standard of living for everyone has been tried before. The trouble is that what you get when the government "guarantees" you a job is a job you probably don't want or ask for, but which is assigned to you along with a shabby house just like the other 10,000 government homes in your town, inadequate healthcare, a poor education and a loss of all that freedom you were supposed to get when you accepted all those "guarantees" in the first place.

Does no one read history anymore? Do we not remember the Soviet Union, China's Cultural Revolution, Cambodia and all those socialist banana republics down in South America.  Once they start going bad because their economies collapse, then you get the goose-stepping "security" forces and the gulags and everything goes downhill from there. 

You see when the "smart people" who think they should run everything for everyone else's welfare discover the beautiful system they've created, based on a flawed core belief in the innate goodness of man, doesn't work, they have to go blame it on someone else, so they turn on the very people they were trying to help.

Sadly, though the belief about people behind the drive to socialism is altruistic, it is a false belief. The core belief is that, relieved from want and assured of all the basic necessities, people will be freed to be happy and creative and they will all work hard for the greater good.  And it is all very comforting to believe this noble altruistic thing.  People who believe this feel very good about themselves and think the rest of us are just plain cynical..

The competing belief about humanity is that we're all basically selfish barbarians that need a reason to do useful work and consistent negative consequences for bad behavior.  While admittedly a cynical view of human beings, it turns out to be a more useful one.  Christians recognize the utility of this darker view of people because we believe in original sin.  Since people are no damned good, for civilization to exist, we must either cajole, punish and reward (as capitalism does so well) or we must convert (as the Christian church does so well). 

Despite socialism's well documented enmity to Christianity, the irony is that Christianity does a better job than any other social system for making people into the kind of people the progressive socialists would like to believe we all are naturally. 

In a sinful world, socialism doesn't work.  The reason it doesn't is that it's based on giving power to government on the false premise that "power does NOT corrupt" and that smart people, given the power of government, would arrange society for the benefit of all and the socialist utopia would break forth.  But power does corrupt. And, as the old adage says, if it's absolute power, it corrupts absolutely.

Mr. Trumka and his ilk initially mean well.  The call for bipartisan support for workers rights seems essentially benign; something we can all get behind. Mr Trumka is, unfortunately, either deluded or power hungry. He believes, perhaps quite honestly, that smart people like himself, if given sufficient power, can arrange things so that everyone will be guaranteed, not antique ideas like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but jobs, housing, health care and a pension.  The Roman high society types called it "bread and circuses".  Instead of an idyllic society (where deranged mobs regularly rose up and murdered the swells in their beds), what the Romans got, instead, was a succession of brutal, corrupt and often insane emperors who used the Roman people like cattle.  

As one of the potential cattle in the socialist world the authors of this "second bill of rights" envision, I want neither to be fattened up nor to have my hide protected so people can make unblemished shoe leather out of it. I want to live, to be free and to find happiness the best way I can.  I want to choose my job, my home, my doctor and how I end my life.

It's unlikely the two sides will ever come together because of the fundamental distance between these two beliefs. It's too hard for either side to make the cognitive leap across the abyss. One says we are basically good and need no God. The other says that God is basically good and we aren't and that the only way we can be good is for God to change us.  There is a third version that Ayn Rand articulated - that man is a greedy barbarian period, there is no hope for us but a system of survival of the fittest.

Either say, sorry Mr. Trumka. I won't sign this. Not ever!

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King

What’s Wrong With New Ideas in Education?

(c) 2012 by Tom King



Anyone?   Anyone?


Trick question. The answer is, “Nothing” or maybe “It’s about time we got some!”


When we built the US education system around the German model back at the beginning of the 20th century, we were in essence trying to fit a round peg in a square hole (the square hole being the German education system). The United States was settled by waves of people seeking opportunities outside the ancient and "ossified" societies of Europe. An unpopular Harvard sociologist once wrote a treatise suggesting that people with ADHD tended to migrate to the US at higher rates and because there is a genetic component, we, therefore, inherited a nation with an inordinate number of restless, high energy people in it. It accounts for the impulse people had to load up creaky Contestogas and move away from the more settled East Coast to the Wild West, which probably explains why the west was so wild in the first place. 

All these hyper people, goes the theory, continued percolating westward till they hit the Pacific Ocean where they piled up on the beach and invented California. (It explains a lot - this theory). So after filling up this country with people who didn’t fit in the Old World’s rigidly classed societies, what to 19th century progressive education theorists do?  They run right back to the Europeans and adopt an education system designed specifically for that stratified European culture. It seemed like a good idea at the time. We were, after all, entering an industrial boom at the time and needed lots of well-mannered factory workers and the Germans did have the ideal education system for that.

The German graded system was designed specifically to teach kids to show up on time, sit still and do repetitive work all day while their supervisors kept up a steady monitoring of their production. In essence, the graded school system was designed as a production line to produce production line workers.  Great if you are training future workers for arms factories and munitions plants (which, as it turns out, was what the Germans were up to). Not so great for the kind of kids we have in great abundance in America. Don’t get me wrong. Some kids do quite well in a graded setting. I, myself, made good grades, but was bored to distraction and never quite found a job that matched my training.

So I gave teaching a shot.

I once taught at a one teacher school in New Mexico where I had 14 kids in 6 grades on 7 reading levels and at least 8 of them were diagnosable with ADHD. This is not uncommon, especially in rural areas, or at least that was my experience. When I started the kids were an average 3 grade levels behind. Their previous teacher was a rigid, old school teacher, much loved by the school's board of directors (4 of the five of whom were retired or former teachers). The parents, on the other hand, did NOT like the teacher and had demanded a new teacher, threatening to pull their kids out of the school en masse because they hated school and were learning nothing. I took the job because my previous school let me go. I was the last hired, so I was the first to go when the school lost a lot of kids at once. I needed a job. They needed a teacher.

I enjoyed the challenge of my new school. My classroom was a moveable feast. I had to keep the kids going all the time. Our recesses were sometimes rather long to allow the kids to blow off steam. We did a lot of cross-grade mentoring in the classes with older kids helping younger kids with their work. I must have done something right. That year my class reached grade level on average on their achievement tests - some exceeded it. My parents were meeting in their homes for prayer groups at the end of the year, praying I would stay. The school board, meanwhile, asked me to leave. Apparently my school room didn't look like a school room was supposed to.  What I learned was that "old school" was more about appearance than results.

Yesterday I wrote about the objections being floated about corporate foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funding new ideas like those proposed by groups like Teach For America and Students First. I think Gates' support for these new education entrepreneurs is admirable. The children of America are not square pegs. They come in a beautiful array of shapes, sizes and learning styles. We need some fresh ideas in education that utilize new technologies and capabilities. Computers, as it turns out, really work with ADHD kids. Maybe that’s Gates’ angle – teach the kids to use computers to educate themselves, so Microsoft will have more customers. I want to know what the heck is wrong with that?  All opponents can give me is either that it threatens the teacher unions or that the funders might make a profit doing it.

Education that makes a profit?  How cool would that be?

What was it Alvin Toffler said? “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” The tools being offered by the Gates Foundation and others are just the tools that kids need to learn, unlearn and relearn throughout their careers.

If Gates sells a few extra copies of Windows or Apple sells a few more Macs as a result of their investments in education, I can live with that. If they make it possible for young education entrepreneurs, freed from the shackles of teacher’s unions and politically polarized school systems, to figure out more effective ways to teach kids, I say, “Good on ‘em.”

The old fossils in the education establishment, however, are really gonna hate it.

Tom King