And so it is that today is Easter Sunday, and it is a glorious day outside in Houston. I hope that everyone is well.
Recently, there has been quite a bit of excitement in the world of politics over the screening of author Ayn Rand's best known work Atlas Shrugged. Before going any further, I have never read Atlas Shrugged, though I did read the Fountain Head over two decades ago, as well as a who wrote this somewhat dismissive column this past Thursday - spent part of their lives reminding people that Ayn Rand was distainful of religion, as she seemed to consider it mysticism.
First things first. There is a reason why religious faith is called Faith. When I went back to school to pick up my undergraduate degree in economics, my introductory microeconomics professor stated that economics was a social science, not a hard science. As a social science, you observe human behavior, and on paper you try to explain formally why people behave the way that they do.
In contrast, with religion and faith, there is no explanation required. Something is true, because it is true. Jesus arose from the dead on Easter Sunday the Christian story tells us, and that is true. But at their best, all religious faiths do try to offer a guide for living a moral and ethical life, as well offer other intangibles such as consolation for the soul, and yes the Wizard does believe - believe mind you - that everyone has a soul. However, I cannot prove that belief.
But there is a good argument to be made that if you get your moral and ethical matters wrong, then not much else matters.
My own spiritual journey
I was raised when I was a boy as a Protestant. My first challenge to my religious faith and schooling actually came when I was still attending the parochial school that I learned my Christianity from. It was during the confirmation process I went through at ages 12 and 13.
One day in class, our teacher asked us the profound question: "How does one get into Heaven?" It seemed a simple question, especially to a group of kids who had been going to a Christian school for the past 7-8 years of their lives, but it was not so. I did not attend church and Sunday school very much, but strangely nearly all of my school mates, who had religiously attended church and Sunday school, got the answer wrong! Almost unanimously, all of us answered the question saying something to the effect that, "we go to Heaven because we do (or did) good things with our lives." In effect, we live by the Golden Rule. However, that answer was not correct, as good deeds done in life have nothing to do with getting into Heaven. In the Christian faith, the way to Heaven is to accept that God - through his Son Jesus Christ - is our Savior, and that to believe and accept that is the way to Heaven. In other words, you truly have to believe to be a true Christian.
As I went through my teenage life, I didn't really encounter any new questions about religious faith, though I did converse from time to time with the friends I made about religion and faith. One of my close friends, who was a proud atheist, converted to Catholicism when he got married. Meanwhile, another close friend, whose father was a Catholic deacon, essentially abandoned his faith for 20 years before slowly returning to it.
When I went to China 20 years ago, I first encountered a land in which religion was officially atheist, but I still can remember being asked by some of my Chinese counterparts whether I believed in God. China was a land at that time where there were no churches. I didn't miss them, but then again the experience of living abroad provided, for a long time, more than enough excitement and stories to make up for the fact that there were no churches or organized faith that I was aware of. Nor can I recall ever reading anything in the Chinese newspapers that ever mentioned religious faith, other than the occasional story of the Dali Lama. But not having churches was one of those things that made living in China feel, spiritually, like I was trapped living in a prison.
But when I went to Asia, I also visited countries like Thailand. I'll never forget my first encounters of seeing Buddhist monks in flowing, saffron colored robes, and thinking that I was not in Kansas anymore. One of my experiences of living abroad was that it made me aware of how large the world really was, as well as how old civilization was, and of the existence of other beliefs. Karen Armstrong wrote in the introduction of her classic work, A History of God that
Despite its otherworldliness, religion is highly pragmatic. We shall see that it is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for it to be logically or scientifically sound. As soon as it ceases to be effective, it will be changed - sometimes for something radically different...
But it wasn't until I hit my late 20's that I encountered my next challenge to my religious faith, and this challenge was from someone interesting and formidable - a scholar named Camille Paglia.
In the first explosive 20-30 pages of Sexual Personae, her classic work which brought her to public acclaim, Camille Paglia expounded that Nature was Man's main problem, and as we live in a scary and unpredictable world where Nature threw her weight around at will. Religion was a kind of adaptive mechanism. We never knew when that next massive earthquake would come, rocking a small island nation far away, unleashing a tsunami that pushed water six miles inland, and wrecking not only homes but damaging nuclear power plants. The greatest achievements of man could be washed away by the power of the natural world.
Paglia's writing was nothing short of a breath of fresh air and gave me an entirely new perspective on life, as well as man's history and our cultures, and she has also spoken of the myopic view of some Americans of the grandeur of the world.
But life grinds onwards, and it is more complicated than one imagines. The pressures of aging and what you have done come forward. One comes to the final realization that one has only so much time left in this world. Many people do come to ask what life is all about, and so it was that some revisit questions like religious faith. For me, there has been a quiet coming back to the faith that I was brought up in.
Ayn Rand
Michael Gerson's column in the Washington Post does accurately summarize, in one paragraph, the general thrust of Ayn Rand's world view.
Rand’s novels are vehicles for a system of thought known as Objectivism. Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with the intellectual pretensions of Hegel, but it can be summarized on a napkin. Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible. “The Objectivist ethics, in essence,” said Rand, “hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.”
But Gerson, by cutting to the chase, overlooks the obvious. Ayn Rand, having come from a society that had been through war and a revolution whose foundations were built on collectivism, and seeing what it did to the human spirit, was desperate to prevent that from happening to America, and she strove to center life back towards the individual. She lived and wrote during a time where collectivism was on the march in America, and she fought to stop it. Indeed, seeing what America went through in the 2008 - 2010 period, with Congress enacting a health care law whose intentions are to make sure that all Americans were to be covered with health insurance, is at rock bottom, a distant echo of the writing of Progressive giant Herbert Croly, who wrote in his magnum opus, The Promise of American Life that
In becoming responsible for the subordination of the individual to the demand of a dominant and constructive national purpose, the American state will in effect be making itself responsible for a morally and socially desirable distribution of wealth.
The health care law, again, is an echo of the great Progressive belief that America is to be a nation of collectivist, national values, and that the ends to reach the (seemingly always undefined and indefinite) summit always justifies the means, and these collectivist values trump those of individuals. Thus, the individual must be subordinated. In other words, the Progressives, at bottom, did nothing less than upend the meaning of America's Founding, and Ayn Rand could see that from a mile away. Hence, the enduring relevance of Ayn Rand's work.
The Future
Some political pundits, like Ron Brownstein writing in the National Journal (and always note what a magazine or periodical names itself), think that the 2012 election will be about the size of government, but this is really a restatement of what the state is or is not supposed to be doing. But until Americans clear their heads about what liberty and freedom really are, then genuine compulsion, whether it be compulsory school attendance, marching young kids off to Afghanistan, submitting to a 4th Amendment destroying airport strip search by the TSA, borrowing against the future just so someone can have a job today without paying for it, or paying for someone else's retirement, are going to be seen as progress over what came before, and not as a diminuation of liberty.
One wonders when the prairie fire will ignite.
Wizard
Addendum: Reason Magazine has a post on Michael Gerson, reminding the public that Mr. Gerson was a speechwriter for George Bush the Younger, as was David Frum, who recently wrote this apology for the Welfare State. It's a reminder that the Bush family vision of the Republican Party really isn't that much different in its vision of what the State is to do than the Progressive vision is.
This past week, the Tenth Amendment Center published an article online which posed the question of whether all governments are socialist?
The answer to that question is a resounding YES!. However, governments are not necessarily socialist in the Marxist sense of the term, meaning that governments are always in control of the productive resources of an economy, whether they be land, labor, or capital. Yes, governments to one degree or another do control productive resources - the United States government owns some 30 percent of all the land in the United States. One also notes that the United States government imposes income and payroll taxes, which means that the central government has command over some of your labor.
But where governments are also socialist is in something that people might not pick up on, in that whatever activities governments' undertake, they spread the costs associated with those activities over the whole of society, rather than those costs being associated with those who are engaged in them. In other words, governments socialize issues that would otherwise be dealt with by individuals, families, or groups.
The Tea Party movement exploded into existence in reaction to federal TARP bailouts of Wall Street, AIG, Chrysler, General Motors, and other private parties. In other words, the market's economic forces of creative destruction, so well described by Joseph Schumpeter, were in play, and they were issuing signals that whatever forces were in place would have to be reorganized somehow. The market had rendered a verdict - their private operations were failures, but that was not politically acceptable, hence the costs of propping up those failed corporations was dumped on taxpayers across America, rather than being borne by the employees and shareholders of those firms. In other words, the costs of those business failures were socialized.
Issues which would otherwise be individual are also socialized:
1) Your old age should be your problem. After all, you have 50 years of adult life to figure out how to deal with it. You can have children to take care of you, buy life insurance or annuities, live with family or friends, just to name a few ideas. But thanks to the wonders of politics, your old age isn't your problem, it's everyone's problem because of the enactment of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
2) Your education: Is that your problem, or is that a social problem? Well, thanks to the joys of compulsory government schools, my compulsory school attendance was your problem, and vice versa.
3) If you live in an area that is prone to natural disasters, is that a social problem, or is acting to protect your home or residence your problem?
4) In his famous February 19th, 2009 rant heard around the world, Rick Santelli wondered why he should be stuck paying for your neighbor's mortgage? Was the fact that your neighbor went south on his mortgage your problem, or a problem between him / her and the financial institution that made that loan?
I could go on about this, but I'm tired of writing and these examples should be enough to get my point across - unless you're the type of person who misses the forest for the trees and gets hung up on picking on my examples, rather than trying to grasp my point. All governments, whenever they act - and on whatever issues they decide to act on - inherently socialize both the problem and the alleged solution. And, a big reason why America is going broke is because for the past 100 years Americans have been invited to think that nothing is off limits, and that there is no limit to political demands that can be made on the state. Yet Americans aren't willing to pay for them. They want other Americans to pay for them.
Wizard
Several weeks ago, the Wizard received an email from the Tea Party Patriots tea party group, stating that the organization was going to be holding a summit conference in Phoenix Arizona. The Wizard decided signed up to attend. Some of it was to find out what this group was up to, but I have to confess that some of it was simply that I wanted a few days off from work.
And so the Wizard went. I decided to drive to Phoenix, an 1,150 mile drive. More than a few people thought that I had lost my mind for deciding to drive rather than fly, but it turned out to be a great drive. The weather was perfect, both on the way out and the way back. I put the top down on my convertible outside of Kerrville Texas, and drove for 2-3 hours with the top down.
Note to self: Your car gets bad gas mileage in high winds and when you put the top down!
Anyway, I made it into Phoenix in the dead of night last Friday morning, having left Houston mid-Thursday morning. I felt better than I expected the next day, and I did get to the summit early, which was being held at the Phoenix Convention Center. The Phoenix center is much prettier than Houston's white elephant George R. Brown center. I hesitated to ask how much Phoenix's temple to the convention gods costs local taxpayers, but it was stylish.
But the Wizard digresses. The Wizard stayed at a hotel that was not far from the shiny new Phoenix light rail line. Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog has covered the usual crap that one can expect from Phoenix's version of the toy train, so I won't bother writing anything new here, other than to say that I never bothered to ride it.
While walking on the way to the convention center on Friday from my parking spot, I came across two women who were operating a hot dog stand on the sidewalks of downtown Phoenix. I asked them whether they had to put up with harassment from the local government health inspectors, to which they answered yes. They told me that the Phoenix city government had recently cut back on inspectors because they had budget problems, but they still get harassed, sometimes more than once per day from health inspection bureaucrats looking for permits and that they've followed the endless rules.
With that adventure over, I went to the convention center for the summit. I estimated that there were some 3,000 attendees, but Tea Party Patriots says there were 2,300 in attendance, from around the country. A few thousand more participated in the summit via the Internet (i.e. "virtually).
Items of interest:
The Agenda:
Arguably, this was the most interesting aspect of the summit. I pretty much was expecting that there would be discussion groups, with speakers, making contacts and what not. However, I was not prepared to find out that the Tea Party Patriots, as a group, seems to have a view that there is a wider need for other issues to address.
The Tea Party Patriots have rolled out what they say is a 40 year plan, because not only do the issues of American constitutionalism and politics matter, but they put forth the issues of individualism in the culture. They advanced the argument that what is shown in our movies, our screenplays, our books, and our art reflect what's going on, and that the arts need to show the story of the Founding, as well as the creed of America. As such, there was a reason why people saw folks in costumes, singing songs, artwork, and what not. One of the panels on Saturday night featured some book authors and a (former) Hollywood screenwriter.
The Wizard agrees that the culture matters. However, I agree with Larry and don't think that we have 40 years left to deal with what's happening.
Attendees made it clear that one big thing on their minds was immigration. The Wizard doesn't think that immigration is the biggest problem in America, but for better or for worse, that's not the attitude of many in the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party Patriots have taken an attitude that before anything else is to be done that securing the borders of America must be done before any talk about anything else is to be done.
The straw polls: There were two straw polls, one for people who attended the event, and another for those who were participating online.
The straw poll that was held by people who attended the event was won by Herman Cain with 22 percent of the vote, with Tim Pawlenty coming in second with 16 percent, and Ron Paul came in third getting 15 percent. Meanwhile, the online poll conducted showed Ron Paul getting 49 percent of the vote, with Herman Cain getting 12 percent and Sarah Palin getting 9 percent. The TPP website has links here.
Groups
The Ayn Rand crowd came out to the summit, featuring a booth and literature. The was there, along with many others.
Speakers and Speeches
ARC director Yaron Brook gave a stirring speech at a breakout session on Ayn Rand's Objectivist thought and individualism.
Ron Paul gave a well received talkat the Saturday general session, where he reiterated his stump issues, including persona liberty, repealing the Patriot Act, sound money and getting rid of the Federal Reserve, small government, and non-intervention in foreign affairs (and that included stopping foreign aid). Dick Morris, who happens to be a rather short fellow in person, gave a shrewd assessment on the current American scene, and offered encouragement.
St. Louis Tea Party organizer, and media personality, Dana Loesch, came out to speak on Sunday. She got onstage wearing blue jeans and casual wear, but with knee high black boots - yes, that stuff gets noticed. However, her speech was fiery. She reminded the Republican Party that it was all but dead after the 2008 elections, and that it was the Tea Party that bailed out the Republican Party. She declared that the name of our country was not the United Plantation of America, but rather the United States of America. Freedom Works has a list of links to videos from other speakers, including Governor Tim Pawlenty and Jeff Flake.
I also met author Matthew Spalding, who gave a tremendous talk about American Progressivism, particularly where its ideas originated from. He also spoke of the need to regain the moral high ground once again. He spoke that we have a narrow window of opportunity to regain freedom and that America was at a fulcrum point. The Wizard will be dedicating my next blog entry to enunciating the ideas of Mr. Spalding's talk.
And finally, I can't finish this without giving a mention to 16 year old Caleb Yee, who started the A Team Tea Party group at his high school and has gotten nothing but grief for it. It seems that some groups are more welcome than others in today's government schools.
An overall assessment
The Wizard received an invitation to attend the 2011 Tea Party Summit a mere six weeks before the event was held. Talking with other attendees from around the country made me think that the event was put together on somewhat short notice, but if it was it turned out fairly well. The event was put on right after C-PAC, and considering the short notice it did draw a decent crowd.
For better or for worse, the Tea Party Patriots have to be paid attention to. They have the ear of Dick Armey's Freedom Works, and have the ear of many in the media, and one of the reasons why the Wizard went was to find out who these people were and to see what this group is up to. Did I regret going? Of course not, but now I have to go back to the problems that are at home.
All my adult life I had a feeling that America was going to run into problems in the early part of the 21st Century, as the issues of the welfare state came to a head. Now that they are here, it still hit me like a bolt of lightning, much like the name of this blog implies.
I've been fated to live in some interesting times....
This weekend, economist Tyler Cowen made a post at his Marginal Revolution website entitled The Shape of Things to Come and Not to Come, which in turn was inspired by a Matthew Yglesias post, that has garnered quite a few responses. The Wizard felt inspired to write, especially by a response to Cowen's post by a visitor who observed that
We've finally jumped the shark. The State is now fixated on continuity of government for its own sake. All we can pray for is some cosmic justice where liberals are taxed into oblivion and their favorite programs slashed. May conservatives be investigated as enemies of the state for their bad attitude. Maybe tax evasion can be re-defined as an act of terrorism.
Maybe "the great filter" is when people worth proliferating finally say "f*** it."
And this is not idle talk. Over the past few weeks, the Wizard has been out and about, and has heard prominent Houston area leaders say some very interesting things in public. For example, Houston business man Jim McIngvale - aka Mattress Mac - told the audience at an event in his original store that he had recently had a conversation with another wealthy businessman who wondered whether America's best days were behind it. McIngvale, ever the optimist, said no. At the recent quarterly meeting of the Harris County Republican Party, Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos spoke, and she told the audience that she was not of a mood to give up on America. She invoked history, telling the audience that Democracy in ancient Greece had lasted several hundred years, while it had lasted a similar amount of time in Rome. She said America was now in her third century, and she told the audience not to give up on her.
The Wizard, quite frankly, is starting to wonder whether America has finally jumped the shark, meaning that is the Tea Party movement an expression of the idea that we are tired of being pack mules for someone else and being looked at as simply being there to pay the bills! If a liberal tries to talk up the idea that we have mounds of poverty in America, then great. So what are you trying to tell me? Are you saying that you can't solve poverty even after the federal government has started spending the equivalent of 25 percent of the entire economy of the country? Are you saying that Social Security has to go on forever just because the first two generations got away like bandits off of the scheme? At what point are Americans going to be allowed to get off the merry go round? Never! In fact we have to continually tighten down the screws because it's all being done for your own good.
In the Summer 2010 issue of the Independent Review, scholar Anthony de Jasay wrote an article entitled The Maximizing State, whereby he concludes that not only does the state use "taxation and redistribution to elicit obedience and maximize its discretionary power," but Jasay argues that
Eventually, however, that power is dissipated through political competition of the state’s own making... Like the firm in a perfectly competitive industry that makes no profit, the state ultimately achieves only its own survival, and no one is satisfied by this relatively pointless result."
In other words, Jasay points towards an idea more and more groups keep fighting over who's going to get what, crisis situations result, but eventually people wake up to the realization that the state is nothing more than a redistributive drudge, and that's when the energy runs out. It's hard to imagine that happening to America, whose Founders created a purposefully energetic government, if it was needed to be energetic, but it even can happen to us.
If America is not to jump the shark, then she'll need to be saved. Britain's Daily Telegraph ran a story yesterday asking whether the Tea Party is more powerful than President Obama? That may be so, but the real question is whether the Tea Party movement is more powerful than the AARP, Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the medical industrial complex that's resulted from Medicare, Medicaid, and Obama Care, along with the countless other social programs and interest groups that have arrayed in Washington? If the Tea Party movement can't beat this vast array of interest groups, then that will be the signal that America really has jumped the shark.
Wizard
Sigh. Another year, another Labor Day weekend - or is it?
Many Americans are no doubt going to celebrate Labor Day by doing what they usually do - have cookouts, perhaps enjoy a parade or some celebration with family and friends, or sit around the house like we used to as kids and watch the Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon. Meanwhile the labor movement and the media will run the same old stories about how the labor movement was responsible for winning the 40 hour work week, health insurance benefits, campaigning for safer workplaces, and other legislative achievements from days gone by, when the labor movement was in its glory, doing much to bottle up the energy of the economic marketplace. One wonders whether or not the marketplace might have brought this about on its own without the labor movement.
But this year's celebrations of the Labor Day weekend holiday seem to be fraught with the irony that on the day we are supposed to be celebrating the contributions of the labor movement to the pluralism of American life, that unemployment by any measure remains high by historical standards. And in the background, the November 2010 elections loom.
Though many will no doubt be touched by the irony of many being unemployed on Labor Day, those aren't the real issues that America faces today. One problem that many Americans have with the labor movement is that the movement has become synonymous with escalating government employee pay and pension liabilities. Labor unions have become practically irrelevant in many sectors of the American labor market.
More to the point, singing all those self congratulatory praises for victories won long ago aren't the issues that American workers face today. The biggest threat to American workers today is that Americans are increasingly faced with the prospect that they are only allowed to keep less and less of the pay that they work for, and the threat of an all encompassing federal leviathan that threatens to turn everyday Americans into tax mules working for someone else.
Even worse, the U.S. Departments of Labor and the Treasury are going to be holding hearings on September 14th - 15thon the subject of lifetime income options for retirement plans. In other words, in non-bureaucratic speak, this is going to be a hearing on the prospect of nationalizing the 401-k and IRA plans of American workers. Gentle readers should be reminded that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obama Care) has a provision in it which - as a matter of interpretation - would allow the Feds to have real time access to your personal finances, ostensibly to check on financial responsibility at point of medical service and that Americans are carrying and keeping up with their required levels of health insurance. Of course Congress would never use the administrative apparatus from this to go after the retirement savings of Americans. Or would they?
So the Wizard is going to lay down the gauntlet to the labor movement of America. I don't want to hear about what unions did for me yesterday. The Wizard wants to know (as would many members of the Tea Party movement) is what the labor movement is going to do for me today, and what that means is answering the question of what are labor unions going to do that will allow me to keep my pay and keep the life savings I have worked for? America is coming to a point where answering those questions have become unavoidable.
Wizard
I should be used to the MSM reporting--but I still always get PO'd. I saw earlier today on FOX that there was a pretty decent turnout protesting. But on ABC nightly news the headline was that one protester spit and there were racial and homophobic slurs against congress men--t they put on a clip to show these slurs--which amusingly did not show anything.
It has been suggested that the MSM, Obama, and I guess Congress are so out of touch they don't realize how angry Americans are--and it is not the kind of anger that is just going to disappear.
But actually they do see it, and in their arrogance don't care. The little people will get over it. while the adults courageously take care of business.
But seriously, by all that is right and honorable, we should be doing more than slurring and spitting at politicians. It is not an exaggeration at all to say that we are more oppressed and less free than were the colonists who took up arms against the British Empire.
If those revolutionaries could see what is going with us who know better(and that includes myself) they would be disgusted.
Even though we know better our efforts are pitiful and willingness to sacrifice comfort and safety nonexistent. We are really not worthy to carry on the flame of the Revolution--and are getting the type of government we deserve.
Becky Chandler, Facebook, March 21, 2010
and
"Let me remind you this [Americans allegedly dying because of lack of universal health care] has been going on for years. We are bringing it to a halt. The harsh fact of the matter is when you're going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people."
Congressman John Dingell, March 23rd, 2010 - discussing why Congress delayed the implementation of the individual health insurance purchase mandate embedded in H.R. 3590 until the year 2014.
But one has to wonder whether Congressman Dingell's legislation will in fact do what it was intended to do. Two weeks ago, the Wizard learned that there was going to be a last minute rally in Washington to oppose the health care bill. Upon learning about this, I volunteered to pay $1,200 for the flight of two of my friends (who subsequently made the news) to go to Washington to join the mob, and watch as Nancy Pelosi - all smiles - paraded her big gavel as she waltzed her way to the Capitol to continue - but not finish - the grand project of all Americans having to have health insurance. I stayed at home during the weekend, cut myself in several places when I fell while running a workout, and built some bookshelves for my study room to hold all the tomes I've accumulated over the years.
Yet, when I read what Ms. Chandler wrote, she struck the Wizard with words that are harder than steel. Charles Krauthammer went on television and said that Mr. Obama's health care bill will not be repealed. Why? One very good reason is that what the "Progressives" did during the sausage grinding was ugly (and possibly unconstitutional), but they were very smart. They made sure that the old folks would get all of their pills paid for right away, and that they would not be left with any donut holes, unlike that evil Mr. Bush did to them. If an attempt to repeal the bill is tried, the Democrats will tell the old folks that those evil freedom types are trying to take their Medicare from them. Progressives can get away with government rationing, but woe be to liberty and freedom types if we were to do the same. Yet, even some liberal bloggers are writing that H.R. 3590 is a bad piece of legislation, and list plenty of reasons why that's the case.
The politics of repeal are easy to understand. As long as Mr. Obama sits in the White House, the mathematics of getting a coalition together to repeal are well nigh impossible. That will have to wait until 2013. Meanwhile either lawsuits will have to commence, but more intriguing is the idea that the States should call a convention to offer and ratify amendments to the United States constitution to curb Congressional power. The state legislative races will be just as important as federal ones this November, but judging from Governor Perry's reaction to the health care bill, I doubt he will have the courage to call for a convention of the states. Governor Perry wants to sit in the White House.
And so it was that my puny efforts to defend liberty were, I suppose, not entirely for naught. I rarely watch television anymore and did not watch television on that Sunday night, but rather I took a walk to the grocery store to do my weekly shopping. It was sunny out, but cold and blustery. It was busy in the store, but there was no sign amongst the hundreds of people whom I saw that a momentous decision was being made by their federal government, something that would affect their entire lives. No shouting, no picketing in front of the store. Nothing. Just a traffic jam on Westheimer and lots of people going about their daily lives. It was as though it was just another day and that nothing had ever happened. One of the subtle ideas of the Founders was that government would be far away and out of sight. Only those who had interests, or had the interest and the fire, would care to travel and contest the issues of the day. It worked once again.
It occurred to me that if I really were to have the guts to defend liberty, I should have gone to Washington with a gun, as Becky stated. I did not. None of us did, despite baitings of our opponents and of politicians. We hold ourselves in and resolve to fight against this breathtaking assault on our liberties peacefully. We receive encouragement from sympathizers in Britain, stating that Americans must fight back, and we will. One thing that this issue has raised, is the reawakening of a titan, that of ordinary Americans starting to ask questions all over again about the meaning of the United States and its Constitution.
I have something to say about the issue of people raising objections to ordinary Americans shouting obscenities at their elected officials. An elderly black woman whom I met through the Metro Rail issue did just that to Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee back in late 2007. When she found out in that Metro had changed their rail plans to run a rail line down her street, she called up Mrs. Jackson Lee and let her have it - full bore, with guns a blazing - the only way that a Gospel filled, fiery old black woman could. The result was that Mrs. Jackson Lee dropped everything she was doing to race back to Houston, where she proceeded to call an emergency meeting with Metro brass and the community over the issue. That Saturday, I watched from the back row of an auditorium, the only white boy in an auditorium room filled with black people, as Mrs. Jackson Lee's constituents slugged it out full bore with her and Metro's brass for 4 hours over light rail. It was a night to remember.
If the passion is high enough, public officials should be sworn at. After all, public officials are in no position to be lecturing Americans about swearing.
Auto insurance verses health insurance
Many supporters of the health care bill, in speaking of its favor, have tried to raise the point that Americans are required by governments to purchase insurance for their automobile. They also have raised the issue that Congress has required that automobile makers require that Americans purchase cars with safety belts. So what's the difference between that and Americans being told they must buy health insurance? Aren't you pesky Tea Baggers a little late - like 75 years too late - to the show? We abuse the Constitution every day, so what else is new? This is the way things have been for a long time!
Well maybe, but just because Washington has been trashing the Constitution and doing business as usual since the New Deal doesn't make it right. People who make these arguments are missing some very important points. Arguing that people are compelled to buy car insurance by governments overlooks the simple observation that Americans are not compelled by law, as a matter of being a citizen of the United States, to buy cars. So if you happen to be like my downstairs neighbor, an old lady who does not work, does not have a car, and walks around to do her needed tasks, the mandate to purchase auto insurance does not apply to her.
The mandate to purchase auto insurance comes from State governments, following in the tradition that doing something like this was not an enumerated power given to Congress, and that State governments possess what are called police powers. Generally, police powers are understood where governments can act to protect the health, safety, and morals of the populace. In the case of owning and operating a car, it quickly became clear some 100 years ago that operating an automobile had many ramifications. A driver had marvelous new found mobility, freedoms, and power at his or her disposal, but they could also evade law enforcement or aid and abet illegal activities. Drivers also had it within their power to destroy the property of others with ease, and could take their own lives or the lives of others.
Clearly it was within the public interest to come to some kind of remedy to handle this matter. Therefore, State governments used their police powers to require that would be drivers pass a driving test, require them to submit to safety inspections, and they required that drivers carry insurance as a way to compensate others in the event that a driver were to cause harm to the life and property of oneself or others, but would otherwise not be able to pay. State governments also consider driving to be a privilege, and as such those privileges can be granted or taken away from you.
It has also been pointed out that the governments required auto companies to make cars come equipped with safety belts as a feature of a car. As the wikipedia entry notes, however, safety belt legislation, including requiring someone to wear a safety belt while driving, is a state matter, consistent with the idea of States wielding police powers, in this case that being of safety. But once again and more importantly, this is a separate idea from requiring someone to buy something.
Americans really need to consider very carefully the full ramifications of the claim that Congress has it within its power to compel Americans to buy something. Already, talk has been floated of requiring Americans to use their 401-k monies to buy U.S. Treasuries, and putting Americans on Social Security. Great. So all the money I've saved through my 401-k the past 15 years, and which I could give to my heirs, would be swiped from me and I would then be wholly dependent on government in my old age. If you are someone who still agrees with the idea that Congress can require Americans to buy health insurance, then what happens if you are told you must by a car or a house, all of course in the name of the common good? Even the Washington Post points out that the legislation raises non-trivial issues of federal authority over individuals, and the ideology that the common good somehow always trumps individual rights is not compatible with our deepest beliefs as expressed by our founders.
Misplaced priorities
David Brooks wrote a very interesting column after H.R. 3590 passed where he said
The Democratic Party, as it revealed of itself over the past year, does not seem to be up to that coming challenge [of cutting federal deficit spending] (neither is the Republican Party). This country is in the position of a free-spending family careening toward bankruptcy that at the last moment announced that it was giving a gigantic new gift to charity. You admire the act of generosity, but you wish they had sold a few of the Mercedes to pay for it.
Many people have questioned the Tea Party movement in one way or another. We've been labeled racists, astroturf (thanks Nancy, I'll take back my $1,200 then), amongst other things. Little do such people know that some of my friends have had to yell at social conservatives, upon hearing that gay people who wanted to be a part of the Tea Party movement were left feeling unwelcome. As Mr. Boggs stated,
We have to decide as a Party what concerns us more. The fact that the country is being driven into socialism, or who someone sleeps with.
And so it was with Obama Care. I find it breathtaking that Congress spent a year furiously battling over this issue when we have a yawning federal deficit that threatens to put us into taxation rates of 40-50 percent of all our incomes, hyperinflation, or debt repudiation. Nor have we dealt in any meaningful way with the Baby Boomer Social Security and Medicare tsunami, the first laps of water were felt this past year. Many people want job creation to be the first order of business, but job creation is very hard when you're so busy affecting change that people don't quite know what's going to happen next. But of course, if you really want to affect change, you follow the advice of Vladimir Lenin, who wrote
The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
Will Americans finally owe up to the mess we have created since the time of the New Deal, or will we have another civil war amongst ourselves with 100 different groups pitted against each other? I don't know. All I know is that this past week, I've been up every night, far into the night, wondering about the future. I've started to read the Federalist Papers and Hayek's Road to Serfdom. We have set for ourselves, in the name of alleviating suffering, policies that encourage us to live for today and not think about tomorrow because tomorrow is not my problem - we'll leave the problem of the future to our children and anyway in the long run we're all dead. The problem with that train of thought is that there's no such thing as a free lunch, and that tomorrow has now come upon us.
I foresaw that this would happen 20 years ago, but even though I knew it would happen, it still hit me like a ton of bricks when it did happen. All I can say is that I haven't felt this afraid for my country since I grew up with the nuclear nightmare, but this time the problem is a cancer that comes from within. Our country is being ripped apart by two parties that are daring each other by walking an incredible high wire act, all while playing with fire. America, it's time to grow up.
I'm going to be up late tonight. After reading some work related stuff, I'm writing a response to Harris County Metro's FEIS for the University rail line. This is the fourth public reply comment I've made on Metro's rail lines. In previous public comments, I've submitted photos to Metro, the FTA, and to members of Congress, that show all the "for lease" signs and boarded up property along Main Street that contradict economic development claims, I've shown empty streets near Crosstimbers and ridden Metro buses to dispute their travel savings time claims, I've predicted cost escalations, have shown evidence that Metro's rosy future cash analysis predictions are garbage (why would Metro Chairman David Wolff otherwise be writing editorials in the Houston Chronicle demanding that Metro's sales tax territorial jurisdiction be expanded?), and have asked whether all we are doing is simply turning bus riders into rail riders, just to name a few things. But every time, Metro gets their FEIS approved, as they simply brush aside any public criticisms with simple one line replies, as they waltz their merry way towards bagging federal grants.
Why bother? The NEPA / EIS process, like nearly everything else the federal government does, is full of nothing but bullshit.
Wizard
The past 15 months or so have not been very kind to the Wizard. A number of setbacks on the personal front, not to mention not seeing things go the way I'd like them to go on the political front, culminating in the possible passage of a major new expansion in federal power via President Obama's health care bill, all don't add up to much very good news.
And so it was that the Wizard was somewhat glad to close the book on the end of the first decade of the 21st century, discerning that maybe I'm not doing the best I can with my own life, when I learned of more awful tidings that came from the winds. I received word from a sister stating that my mother's one remaining sister suffered either a massive stroke or a heart attack. The word has it that she was walking back to her car from a night out with her friends (she had not been drinking, or otherwise been under drugs or medication). The story I've been told is that on the way back to the car, she stopped in mid stride and said, "I can't breathe!" She then collapsed to the ground on the edge of winter.
A fire station was several blocks away and help was summoned. She was brought back to life, but she had been without oxygen for many minutes. I received a call from my sister saying, amongst many things, that people are stopping by to say their last farewells and pay their respects. And so it is that the Wizard will be leaving tomorrow on a mighty drive to a far away place to see my mother's sister as she passes on.
I told my mother that her sister's meeting with the inevitable happened 27 years to the day when her own mother passed away, of fluid build up in her lungs. My mother said to me that my sister had noted this also. How strange the fates that take us.
And yet, my aunt's passing strikes me far harder than the death of my grandmother so many years ago. I did mourn all those years ago, but I've become aware that it is likely that I have fewer years left in this world than I have already lived. Yet, what have I done? Where has the time gone? What am I to do with the time I have left? How can I, in my own small way, make the world a better place than it was when I first was brought into it?
I went out on a four mile run along Westheimer the evening I heard the news. I will always remember how the sun was setting in the west as I ran home. Somehow, as I ran, it seemed to me that all the crap I deal with in my own life didn't seem to matter all that much. Indeed, it is only now, as I reach my middle age, that I am beginning to understand the true meaning of the words, may you rest in peace, because it is only at this time of my life that I've come to see that our souls never really will have true peace as long as we are of this world. I wonder - is that the origin of religion, of faith, or of the belief in God?
My aunt did not have the easiest of lives. My mother and her sisters grew up during the Depression and WWII on a family farm in a small town in southwestern Wisconsin. My grandparents eventually took regular jobs, but my aunt followed my mother to the bright lights and to the big city. Women in those days did not have all the opportunities that they do today, and she did mostly odd jobs to make do. She met her first husband, whom I barely remember, but that was not to be. However, she grew wiser and better at living as she became older and met a second man who was to be with her until he passed away five years ago.
Her second husband, I believe, was the best thing that ever happened to her. He worked in the cattle yards and slaughter houses, then drove a bus, ferrying handicapped children until he was felled by a stroke well into his 70's. They brought stability into each others' lives and they raised a foster daughter, the child of some former employers of hers, both of whom had passed onwards when the girl was small.
My aunt was wonderful at giving me Christmas clothes that I didn't want to wear, but once again she got better as she got older. I still have some sweaters she gave me from 20 years ago. They never went out of style and are nice and warm. We are supposed to go to church on Christmas Day. I think I will wear one as a tribute to her.
And so her life was. I now go to help clear what's left of her life, but the biggest thing I want to take with me are some photos or memories she may have left behind. I am sad, but in a way it was better for me that my aunt passed on before my parents did. I now have a warning of what I will feel like when my own parents leave this world forever and I know it will not be easy.
So did my aunt live a full life, and try in her own small way to make the world a better place? The answer in my own mind, no doubt, is yes she did. May she rest in peace.
Wizard
I caught this post via the Houston Chronicle from Keep Houston Houston entitled A funny thing about transit. It was a most interesting post coming from Keep Houston Houston.
The Wizard has noted before that I can in fact reach my downtown job from where I live via Metro bus. It's just that it would add 1 hour of time to my round trip commute to do so and I've decided that it's not worth my time to put up with a 1 hour and 45 minute round trip work commute every day.
I subscribe to the Journal of Urban Economics, ergo I know there have been plenty of studies that have been done to estimate what the value of people's time is on transit trips. The learned literature strongly suggests that the in time spent in transit is valued at some 40-50 percent of their per hour wage rates, while time spent in accessing and waiting for transit vehicles is perceived at a considerably higher rate.
Another part of the transportation mobility equation for me is that I have social interests that would be a bit hard to satisfy via transit, but not by my car. My social interests are almost all located between my work place and my home, ergo I don't have to drive much in order to live what for me is a reasonably satisfying life. Now if I were to get married that would be another story.
So, KHH has much of it right, but not all of it. Transit does limit your mobility to the extent that you only get to go where Metro goes, so it alters your lifestyle in that extra dimension. It sucks up your time and it is not 24x7. Transit also limits at least some of your shopping opportunities vis-a-vis a car because it's very difficult to haul that 52 inch plasma screen TV onto a Metro Bus or rail car. Allowing jitney competition would aid in transit mobility, but it's still impossible to understand why 30 miles of rail lines have to be built when Metro already has a bus network that runs into the thousands of miles, and where we could achieve close to the same thing rail would offer via adding dedicated bus lanes to major thoroughfares which would remove much of the speed and reliability problem that transit vehicles have to contend with.
Always remember, it's added mobility, not mobility substitution that we're after. As for why the votes for Metro Solutions came from the inner city and not the suburbs, maybe that has more to do with the idea that folks in the inner city might be able to reach the Medical Center via a $1.5 billion train that would run from the Hillcroft transit center, but a suburbanite will not be able to take a train that runs from Katy to Kingwood.
Wizard
Last Wednesday evening, the Wizard spent the hours in the way he likes most - wiling the hours away with the Wednesday Knights, playing several rounds of 10-20 minute chess at a Houston area restaurant. The Wizard won one game and lost two, but due to a peculiar set of circumstances, I still took home the third place pidling trophy for my efforts.
Since the Wizard was doing something more important than watching TV or paying attention to politics Wednesday evening, the Wizard missed President Barak Obama's nationally televised address on whether the United States government should pass legislation on mandating that Americans must have universal health insurance coverage.
The reason why the Wizard didn't bother to watch the President's televised address was because he knew that he wouldn't miss much. That belief was validated when I picked up my old fashioned, fish wrapper version of the Houston Chronicle yesterday morning before I headed off to work. The front page story, carried from over the news wires, was of South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson, who cried out "You Lie!" when President Barak Obama stated that the new universal health insurance legislation would not cover or benefit illegal immigrants.
Much commentary has been inked and typed over Congressman Wilson's outburst, which he later offered an apology to the President that Mr. Obama accepted. Fairly typical of the commentary offered was by this guy, who complained about the halls of Congress no longer being a place of civility. The Chronicle editorial board spoke of the idea that there was no room for such rudeness in the debate over the future of health care and one-sixth of the American economy.
The Wizard takes a bit of a different view over Congressman Wilson's outburst. It wasn't that Mr. Wilson was rude to the President of the United States - he was. But plenty of people are rude to the President (or for that matter, just about any politician) every day in many sorts of ways. Often that rudeness towards others could be justified in some way. Sometimes we read about it in print, or we never hear about it as they may be words whispered between friends in private. To the Wizard however, it had a lot more to do with the idea that one man called another man a liar to his face in public.
Politicians do lots of stupid things, much like the rest of us. Age is no barrier to doing stupid things, thinking of stupid things to do, or for that matter not knowing how to run your own life. Back in 2001, the Wizard worked many hours on the City of Houston TABOR / Revenue Cap proposition drive. After City Secretary Anna Russell failed to verify, after 48 days, that we had 20,000 valid signatures to place the proposition drive on the November 2001 ballot, I suggested to our most prominent plaintiff in our lawsuit against the City of Houston that we get a mob of people out and drive our cars in circles around City Hall, honking our horns as we went. This gentleman, who happens to be older, much wealthier, and wiser than I was (and am) threw water on the idea. He said to me something that I never will forget. He told me that "Republicans just don't do that sort of thing."
I got the message, but it's a message worth repeating to myself. Even when something does not go your way, try to learn from it and move on. Don't try to act like a jackass.
So, fast forward eight years and what do I find Republicans doing? Well, I find that lots of people who call themselves Republicans acting just in the same way that I suggested they do eight years ago in front of City Hall. They are running around holding rallies, flash mobs, and acting like a bunch of jackasses. Those mobs and rallies are being attended by Republicans who tell me that they deserve their Social Security check because they've paid into it, or that they don't want politicians to touch Medicare because they like it. Every time they do that, they're acting like a jackass. Every time a Republican politician proposes some expensive new public welfare entitlement, they're acting like a jackass. In my view, that means that both Bush the elder and Bush the younger were a pair of jackasses. Arguably, the last politician who wasn't a jackass was Ronald Reagan.
And so it is. Hearing things like Congressman Wilson's outburst, or learning that California assemblyman Mike Duvall having to step down because he was caught on tape telling salacious stories of his romps with mistresses lobbyists, point to a political party that has been electing too many guys who turn into jackasses once they get into office, but has not been doing enough intellectual thinking, offering new ideas, alternatives, nor is it a party with members who have spine. Otherwise, the future of the Republican party will belong to the Mike Duvalls, and the Joe Wilsons of the world, and that's not a party worth paying attention to or voting for. Why? Because deep down, those guys (and they constituency they represent) are no different from the jackasses who happen to be sitting on the other side of the aisle.
Wizard
Addendum: In today's Houston Chronicle, the newspaper carries the AP wire story about President Obama now holding the bullhorn. The story states that
Keeping Americans safe, the president says, is "the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning; it's the last thing that I think about when I got to sleep at night."
Bush used to say the same thing.
That's too bad, because both men didn't swear an oath upon ascending to office to keep Americans safe. They swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.
Further addendum: A story just came across the wires from Politico. It wonders whether petty GOP cranks are dominating the public debate.
About a week ago, I was invited to go to Congressman Ron Paul's birthday bash, which was held yesterday (August 15th) at the San Luis Convention center along the Seawall in Galveston. At first I didn't want to go because I haven't been of the mood of late to pay attention to politics. However, I had a long week at work, but more importantly a number of events that have occurred in the past year that that have led me to reexamine many aspects of my life. I called the gentleman who had sent the original email invite if he was still going to the birthday bash, to which he said yes. He then - thoughtfully - asked me how long it had been since I had been to Galveston? I answered about 12 years. He said, it sounded to him like I needed to go and get out of town for a day or two.
It was a great idea. I really didn't give a damn about going to hear some long winded politicians get long winded about whatever it was that pissed them off and fired them up, but the prospect of walking along the beach on a hot sunny August afternoon and spending $20 to sit down and enjoy a nice plate of barbeque with some friends for a few hours really sounded like a wonderful thing to do.
And so it was. We took off about 11:30am, got stuck in traffic around Clear Lake City, but made it into Galveston around 1:15pm. The first thing I noticed was that the trees along the medians and esplanades were drab and gray. It occurred to me that the trees might be dead, maybe because of salt water that had been pushed in from the ocean from Hurricane Ike. Otherwise, Galveston seemed lively, though we noticed houses and structures here and there that had been abandoned or were still boarded up. Still, I would judge that Galveston has made a solid recovery from the devastation wrought upon it by Ike.
We had some time before some pre-dinner speakers were scheduled to speak, so we headed over to the privately held Porretto Beach, where we met up and had a nice 30-45 minute talk with Sonya Porretto, about her legal battle with the State over her family's ownership of a stretch of beach.
As we got out of my car, I immediately caught a whiff of the salty sea air, something I had not smelled in years. We walked through a neighborhood of mostly modest houses, nearly all of which were now repaired. Almost immediately, I realized why it was that people loved living near the sea. In the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, environmental attorney Jim Blackburn wrote that before people were to be allowed to rebuild so close to the coastline, they should be shown maps of the devastation and misery that occurred as a result of Ike's wrath. All I can say in response to that is that the moment I basked in the sunshine, smelled that salty air and walked through that neighborhood towards the seawall, I knew that no amount of protest or anger from Mr. Blackburn or his friends, nor would any amount of wrath from God and Mother Nature would convince some people to not want to live near the ocean.
We chatted with Ms. Porretto, as mentioned above, and I immediately resolved to try to start blogging about her story. But more to the point, listening to her made me ask myself for the 100th time why it was that I didn't become a lawyer, or at least go through law school? I've listened to this crap over and over again so many times and it makes me think that there's often no accountability anywhere to be found or had in this world. It's time that I started resolving some of these questions that have been simmering inside of me once and for all.
After our visit with Ms. Porretto, we made our way over to the convention center, where there were packed rooms listening to the invited speakers. It didn't really bother me that I could not get in or hear what they were talking about. I wandered over to the main convention room, where I met some friends and chatted about various things. Eventually the room filled up and we had our dinner. There were auctions to raise money for Ron Paul, as well as speeches from the likes of Barry Goldwater Jr. that weren't worth listening to. I mostly enjoyed being with my friends and chatting amongst ourselves about battles from the past, things we wanted to do now, or were thinking about doing in the future.
About half way through Mr. Paul's speech, I got up to go to the bathroom, but instead of going back into the conference room, I decided to sit outside on the steps of the convention center. I sat, staring into the vast expanse of the Gulf of Mexico, contemplating my life and what I would do with what remained of it. It has become far more important of late for me to be doing things like this rather than pay attention to what the talking heads and windbags are griping about today.
And so it was. I stopped by a store to pick up some drinks on the way back to Houston. When we got back to town, the gentleman I was with pointed out that I should try a burger at Stanton's sometime when I'm in that part of town. I feel like I'm catching a second wind, rediscovering that learning something new about the people you care about, your hometown, and doing things that you find are worth doing is what makes living all worthwhile.
Wizard