The email was lengthy and quite worrisome. It was clear that the MacGregor Place subdivision had taken a real beating during the January 9th rain storm. Kids had to be taken out of HISD's Peck Elementary school, and the neighboring Kipp Academy charter school by dump trucks because school buses could not make it in and out of the neighborhood. Little did I know that this was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to this local horror disaster.

I got to the meeting just as it was starting. As I was walking up to the local YMCA building where the meeting was held, a friend of mine was giving an interview to a channel 26 Fox News reporter, who was the only media person who covered the event. The Fox News internet video did a pretty good story of covering the meeting, but here are more details.

The meeting was kicked off by CM Adams, who introduced Harris County Precinct 7 Constable Mae Walker, who told the audience that her office has access to 2.5 ton and 5 ton high water vehicles for use in the event of an emergency. Her office also has boats if people are stranded. CM Adams then introduced to the audience representatives from Union Pacific railroad, the City of Houston Public Works and Engineering department (PWE), the Harris County Flood Control District, Metro, and the American Red Cross. CM Stephen Costello, father of the Proposition 1 rain tax, was also in attendance.

Benton Bond, an employee with Union Pacific railroad, was first up to the microphone. Mr. Bond gave a roughly 20 minute presentation on the events of January 9th. Specifically, Union Pacific railroad has for many decades operated a freight rail line that runs generally in a north / south direction, and which almost parallel to Spur 5 near Interstate 45, and runs close to the MacGregor Place subdivision. Mr. Bond thanked the audience for photographs and videos that people had sent in to UPRR and to the other parties, as the photos and videos enabled the parties to construct a timeline of the events of that day.

Mr. Bond told the audience that the Kuhlman gully, which runs in an east / west direction through the subdivision, then turns north towards Braes Bayou after it leaves the subdivision, runs underneath the rail yards. Mr. Bond said that it started drizzling about 6:00am on January 9th, but it started raining very hard at approximately 9:15am.

Mr. Bond told the audience that by 9:30am, Union Pacific had evidence that street flooding had already started. Between 10:00am - 11:00am, floodwaters started entering cars and buildings in the area. By 11:00am, the Kuhlman gully had reached capacity, and at 12:21pm, witnesses spotted a 75 foot long by 18 food wide culvert extension that ran underneath the Union Pacific railroad tracks that had experienced damage. The Royal Palms apartment complex, which is located along Griggs Road, is federal Section 8 housing, and is located right along where Metro is building the light rail line, was extremely hard hit, as can be seen in the Fox News video links above, which showed residents sweeping water out of their first floor units.

Mr. Bond finished up his talk and video presentation by saying that the flood was a 25 year flooding event, that the roads flooded first, then the Kuhlman gully, and he showed a photo of the upended 75' by 18' culvert that was sticking up into the air. Mr. Bond alluded to the photo, noting that the photo had gotten press coverage and had been widely circulated in the community. Mr. Bond stated (as did a spokeswoman for UPRR in the Fox News video) that UPRR had acted to cut the culvert up in order to free it and allow flood waters to drain out.

A professional engineer who was employed with Union Pacific, whose name I didn't catch spoke briefly about the rainstorm itself. He said that 4.28 inches of rain fell between 9:15am - 11:15am, and that 4.81 inches of rain fell between 9:15am - 12:15pm. This engineer told the audience that the flood was a 200 year event, contradicting the earlier statement that the flood was a 25 year event. He said that City of Houston storm sewers were designed for a 2-10 year event in residential areas and 5-10 year events in commercial areas, something I have heard said before. But the engineer stated that construction going on in the neighborhood cut down on storm capacity because water could not get into the street culverts.

Next up on the speakers list was Eric Dargan, an engineer with City of Houston Public Works and Engineering. Mr. Dargan repeated that a 2 year flooding event is considered to be 4 inches of rain within 24 hours. Mr. Dargan told the audience that there were no collapsed or blocked storm sewer lines, contradicting what the previous engineer had said.

Mr. Dargan stepped down, and Curtis Lampley with the Harris County Flood Control District stood to speak before the audience. Mr. Lampley said that the HCFCD was responsible for maintenance of the bayous, but not the storm sewers or the streets of the city. He said that the HCFCD does not issue permits, nor does it do culverts. This was in response to a question of who was responsible for what.

Next up was Metro's Dave Couch, director of capital projects for the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Mr. Couch told the audience that the rainfall overwhelmed the drainage system. All storm sewer lines were in service, and he said that Metro was increasing the capacity of the storm lines. He asserted that ther was no solid runoff into the system. Were all lnlets to the storm sewer system sealed, he was asked? Mr. Couch answered, "no." Mr. Couch also told the audience that Metro was installing larger storm lines as they built rail, increasing them from their current size by three inches.

A gentleman from the City of Houston emergency management division, whose name I did not get, then came up to speak about the aftermath. He told the audience that information for a federal disaster declaration was being sent to the State of Texas. Someone had enough wits around them to contact the American Red Cross, which did all the heavy lifting in terms of helping residents who were stricken by this disaster, by providing food, medical care, and simple help. Someone there got in touch with St. Francis Xavier Catholic church, whose Priests and congregation threw open its doors and gave shelter to those who were rendered temporarily without shelter.

The floor was open for questions. One person asked whether the flow of water had been diverted from Braes Bayou? The answer was no. The next question, however, fired the crowd up. One person demanded to know whether constructing the Metro rail line had caused the flooding? One of the neighborhood pastors said that he had lived in the neighborhood for 25 years and it had never flooded. Another resident testified that the water had flowed very slowly out of the neighborhood. The rain had stopped around 2:00pm that afternoon, but the water did not drain out until after 4:00am the next morning.

In response to this, Dwight Boykins, who sits on the Rebuild Houston committee, and Houston City Councilman Stephen Costello, who showed up to pimp his new rain tax, got up to speak. Mr. Boykins said that the Rebuild Houston was not ready to start installing new drainage. When asked by what criteria projects would be first worked on, he said that the entire city was being mapped by LIDAR. CM Costello told the audience that the first thing that would be done is to commit to the current five year capital improvement plan (CIP), and he said that projects would be "needs based." Costello told the audience that the Rebuild Houston fund had accumluated $60 million so far and that it was on a path to accumulate $100 million by the end of the year. CM Costello went on to say that "what was amazing about the Renew Houston plan was that we passed a funding source without a plan," to which one woman in the audience replied that that she did not vote for Renew Houston because it was Rescrew Houston.

CM Costello went on to say that a plan for Rebuild Houston would be out on February 10th, and that "needs based" criteria would be based on 311 calls to the city, age of facilities, and traffic counts.

Talk resumed about the flooding that occurred on January 9th. The City of Houston emergency management person came back u to say that the criteria for federal disaster dollars was that 25 or more homes needed to have experienced 50 percent or more damage in terms of value. His team had already received 139 applications from home owners for assistance, far exceeding this rather low criteria, but he also said that apartments also count towards the 50 percent criteria. He went on to say that the Royal Palms apartment complex is uninhabitable and that they were expecting 16 more applications from residents. The Royal Palms apartments were a U.S. HUD based community, but he said that HUD had not given anything to them and that HUD was not financially responsible for the Royal Palms because HUD does not own the Royal Palms apartment complex. Meanwhile, the landlord of the complex was nowhere to be found, something that angered CM Wanda Adams, who had gone looking for the landlord.

HUD had told residents that they had to vacate the complex, and stories were told that food had been stolen from apartment residents. Despite the fact that HUD had told the residents that they had to vacate, HUD had no money for relocation funds. There were some residents who volunteered to relocate to some vacant apartment units up on the northside of Houston, but some people had decided to stay in the Royal Palms. Where else would they go? The emergency management fellow said that regardless of what else they would do, they needed to get their applications for disaster relief in, as they were planning on sending the City's application for federal disaster relief to Governor Perry's office the next day, and that agents from the State would be coming to the area to audit the claims before sending the application to President Obama.

Benton Bond from UPRR got up to address some more questions about the possible role of the damaged culvert in the flooding. He said that the concrete culvert that had risen up had been installed 10 years before, and had been inspected several times since installation. The last inspection was back in March 2011, He told the audience that the company was already in the process of designing a new pipe, but that one thing that was a barrier to a fast installation was that when the old pipe was installed, the City of Houston was very slow in allowing a permit for installing it. Would the City act more quickly this time to abet the reconstruction of the culvert under the UPRR rail line?

Another resident stood up to speak, saying that there had been no flooding in the MacGregor Place subdivision in nearly 50 years, and that he had seen Metro's shielding bags that covered the street gutters saturated with mud. He understood that Mr. Couch had said that they were designed to let water through, but nothing else, but those covers were holding everything back. Eyewitnesses in the neighborhood had seen Metro Rail contractors sweep debris from construction into the storm sewers, to which Mr. Couch said that Metro was responsible for the street inlets.

The meeting ended. Afterwards I spoke with some of the residents. One person said that the University of Houston, which is on the other side of MacGregor Park on MLK, had not flooded during the storm, whereas their neighborhood did, and they wanted to know why? Another woman who identified herself to me as a lawyer said to me that nothing had been said at the meeting, and she was correct. There were a mass of contradictory statements that were made at the meeting, and I told her that the reason why nobody really said anything of substance was not because the investigation was preliminary, but it was because none of the representatives wanted to find themselves on the witness stand a year from now being grilled by her as to who was really at fault for causing the MacGregor Place subdivision to not drain out after a major rain storm, when it had successfully handled Hurricane Alicia back in 1983, Tropical Storm Allison back in 2001, Hurricane Rita in 2006, and Hurricane Ike back in 2008?

I also found out after the meeting that Metro is in the process of condemning a cement and gravel plant that lies just outside the MacGregor Trail subdivision, not far from the Union Pacific rail line. Metro plans to build a rail car barn and maintenance facility at the terminus of the rail line, but the current owners are fighting Metro in court over the condemnation. Did this property in any way possibly contribute to the flooding problem?

The following Saturday, I went to a gathering of bloggers and was told that there had been extensive ponding of water along Harrisburg, where Metro has started building a light rail line, and that one downtown parking garage along Metro's rail line (Metro has dug up the streets of Rusk and Capitol) had also experienced flooding. There is more rain expected this week, which will allow for capturing of more evidence of whether or not Metro's construction is causing flooding along the streets. It also occurred to me to revisit the federally mandated environmental impact statements that Metro had to produce in order to secure federal grant funding to see what Metro and the FTA said about flooding. If those EIS studies didn't show anything about flooding, all that goes to show is that the EIS process is nothing more than a phony dog and pony show to keep people employed, rig the process to ensure the outcome that the transit agency desires (which was to build rail), and for environmental groups to use to stop road construction.

This whole episode reminds me of part of the reason why I started blogging in the first place: Because the Houston Chronicle and other news outlets decide what's news and what isn't, and Chris Moran's higher ups decided that Helena Brown's okay to sell an 8,840 square foot parcel of land that pissed off some of the neighborhood folks who couldn't be bothered to cough up their own money to buy that land was news, while the flooding out of an subdivision, possibly caused by Metro's construction of a rail line wasn't. One resident said on television that all they wanted was not to be treated like animals, and ladies and gentlemen, treating people like animals is not acceptable.

Wizard .

.

http://schools.houstonisd.org/peck

I did not serve in the military, something that troubled me when I was younger and I sometimes regret not doing as I get older, with a mind that somehow that serving in the armed forces is part of a full life. But I also remember becoming an adult and sometimes running into WWII veterans at various events. I vividly remember at one public event that a pair of WWII veterans were off in a corner, where one of the vets had a massive memorial book that he had put together of the war, complete with news clippings of the day. More about those two men later.

But the real long term effect of Pearl Harbor is what happened afterwards. After Congress declared war on the empire of Japan, Mr. Roosevelt sent a list of items to Congress of what would be needed to fight the war - millions of military uniforms and military clothing, untold thousands of tanks, scores of thousands of military trucks and jeeps, rifles, machine guns, bazookas, artillery pieces, aircraft of all kinds, ships and submarines, and billions of rounds of ammunition, shells, and bombs. Now Congress faced the task of trying to figure out how to pay for the war.

In order to come up with a plan, the Treasury (following consulting advice from a guy named Milton Friedman) settled on payroll withholding - withholding money out of the paychecks of Americans before they received their paycheck. Keeping in mind that this was introduced in the 1940's, at the very dawn of the computer age, accomplishing this from an administrative perspective was going to be quite a feat. After all, the income tax was not going to be something with which to wage class warfare on by beating up on a few hundred thousand or a few million rich folks. Instead, now the federal government was going to be confiscating the income of millions of average Americans. However, Social Security had been enacted just a few years before, and the administrative machinery for massive withholding of wages and salaries was in place by the time America had entered the war.

Withholding income is one of those insidious ways of taxation. Instead of whacking a worker with $20,000 of taxes in a year, withholding income means that the federal government withholds $800 in taxes every 2 weeks. $800 is a lot of money, but the point here is that withholding puts people on the drip. It's a narcotic way of confiscating wealth, not so easily noticed. It certainly is much less noticed than walloping a taxpayer with a single $20,000 bill at the end of the year.

And so it was that the federal government had now assumed control over vast swathes of the economy and many aspects of American life, all in the name of fighting the Nazis and the Japanese. The United States Supreme Court also gave its blessing in the realm of law, but signing off on ever greater federal controls over the economy through the Commerce Clause, culminating in the ruling of Wickard vs. Filburn in 1942, which involved a case where a Congress could command a farmer to destroy his crops even though the farmer had no intention of selling them.

Sticklers for arguing about the political economy will want to interject about the Federal Reserve in 1913, and lots of other issues, but World War II was undoubtedly the massive turning point where the political centralization and nationalization of American life was accomplished. Unlike every other war before, after WWII the federal government was not rolled back. After the Civil War for example, income taxes were repealed in 1872. That did not happen this time. Instead, there was a demobilization after the war and the size and scope of the federal government did start to shrink, but America entered the Korean War, the machinery of Washington was revved back up again and the federal government was confiscating 20 percent of the economy again, continuing to do so for the entire Cold War era. During the entire 1950's, the military industrial state was paramount, with military spending taking up over 50 percent of the federal budget, but during the 1960's that all changed. After 1960, the centralized welfare and entitlement state was enacted and started steadily consumed more and more of federal taxes. It was when the vaunted WWII generation was in its early 40's when a fellow 40-something President John Kennedy made his pitch to enact Medicare and Medicaid to them. Pay a few pennies in payroll taxes today, and your Baby Boomer and Generation X kids and grand kids will pay an arm and a leg to take care of you at taxpayer expense by the time the 1980's and 1990's roll around! What a deal! Kennedy couldn't get the vastly expanded federal social welfare state through, but Lyndon Johnson sure was able to, and now America is stuck with this.

To me, this is the long run legacy of Pearl Harbor. The war and the Depression inured Americans to government just as many probably hoped that it would, and now too many Americans belonging to too many interest groups now have a stake in voting for a living rather than working for a living. Moreover, the war nationalized American life and cemented the federal government as being paramount in the lives of Americans.

Which brings me back to those two elderly gentlemen I met at that event over 20 years ago. I walked up to them and started looking at the WWII memorial book. One of them turned to me and said, "Son, you owe us something." We've been dealing with the politics of that sentiment ever since.

Wizard

But the most recent twist in comparing how the Occupy crowd has been treated by government verses how the Tea Party movement has been treated has erupted in Richmond Virginia, where the local Tea Party has filed suit against the City of Richmond, on the grounds that the Richmond Tea Party had to pay for access to city property to hold their protests, whereas the local Occupy group has gotten preferential treatment. Many in the Tea Party were surprised and angered at the differential treatment given to them by the local government, which resulted in the City imposing an audit against the Richmond Tea Party. In a twist to the story, the local Occupy movement has come to the defense of the Tea Partiers.

One person who was not surprised that something like this would happen was none other than the Wizard. Why? Well gentle readers, the Wizard has not one, but two stories to tell you about how local governments treat dissenters and those who exercise speech.

1) Back around 2006, when Metro had announced that the agency was planning on running a rail line down Richmond Avenue, I met a businessman who had a business along Richmond Avenue who told me of a story where he attended a public event featuring several Houston City Council members in addition to a presentation from Metro. While at the event, he spoke up, describing how rail would affect his business and arguing that Richmond Avenue was not on the ballot.

So, what was the result of this man's exercising his Freedom of Speech rights found in the Texas and United States' Constitutions? Well, several days after attending that event, this man was visited at his business by City of Houston inspectors, demanded to see his business permits, something that had never happened to him despite the fact that he had been at his location for over 20 years.

2) A year or two later, when I was working with the Floodway Coalition in their property rights battle with Houston City Council, one of the members of the core group of activists waging the fight, who had owned his business for many years, expressed in a public meeting that as a result of the amending of the Floodway Ordinance, his land had lost almost all of its value, and that he had been the victim of a taking by the government through law.

So, what happened to this businessman? You guessed it! Within days after having gone public with his plight, City of Houston inspectors showed up at his business demanding to see his permits. Not only that, they decided to start poking around his property to see if they could find any violations of city ordinances. This was happening to a man who not only had been a pillar of the community, but had given away small freebies to the City, mostly for reasons of good publicity for his business, but none of that mattered when City Council decided to bite him.

When the excitement over what is happening with the Richmond Tea Party erupted, the Wizard briefly though of the idea of demanding my money back for paying for the use of the lawn at Discovery Green on April 15th, 2010. However, I suspected that had I done so, that Felicia would have been subjected to possible harassment by the City of Houston in the same way as the Richmond Tea Partiers were, ergo I backed off.

But the Wizard bids activist to remember these pearls of activism no matter where you live. Frequently, when it comes to free speech rights, it is free speech for me but not for thee, depending upon who happens to have won the last election and is now holding office.

Wizard

The Occupy Wall Street movement has quickly spread to numerous cities around America in the two months since it started in Zucotti Park in lower Manhattan. The press seems to have given these folks fawning coverage despite the fact that there have been numerous recorded acts of mayhem that have occurred in various cities. This has prompted a countering by law enforcement this past week to shutdown or clean up various encampments, sometimes resulting in the thuggery that astonishes. The Occupy crowd has made, at times, a chaotic list of political demands, but here is one site that lists nine of them.

But my interest was piqued. The local Occupy Houston group announced that they were holding a strategy session at the Houston Public Library yesterday, November 19th, 2011. I decided to put on my spy gear and check them out.

I arrived about five minutes after the meeting started. The event planners had announced that they had room for up to 200 people to attend the event, but about fifteen minutes after the meeting started, I did two head counts of attendees, and counted roughly 85 were in attendance. The crowd was perhaps 80 percent white, with a handful of hispanics, and a few blacks in attendance. I would have to say that perhaps 50 percent of the people in attendance were under the age of 30, but there were people across the age spectrum in attendance.

Even though I went in under the radar, I did see a handful of people in attendance whom I've met before, long time familiar figures in Houston's Progressive enslavement politics. Amongst them were: Ted Weisgal, who owns Leisure Learning, Ovide Duncantell of the Black Heritage Society, and I saw for the first time someone I've seen post on Facebook, a fellow named Egberto Willies. It was stated by one speaker that she recognized many of the attendees, as she knew them from various Progressive events.

The event started with a bunch of hand signals that were meant to help the meeting move along, since there was a lot of ground to cover. The stated goals of the meeting here:

1) Causes of the economic crisis

2) Finding concrete solutions

3) Occupy Houston – what comes next? – sustainability of the movement.

After the meeting got started, it turned out that the group intended to break out into no less than 17 different groups, all with varying topics to go over, including finance and outreach support, health care, women's issues, legal issues, "sustainability", education, prison and mental issues, economics, and dealing with the media. I had to laugh that a gathering of some 85 people were attempting to take on such a huge number of topics. A "Medicare for All" sign had been placed against the wall.

Be that is it may, the meeting then went on to people who had signed up to speak. Each person was given two minutes to address the audience. Here is a list of some of the things that were said by those who spoke:

1) One person said that President Obama thought that the Swedish economic model was good.

2) One older fellow, who wore a black shirt with a Che Guevara image on it, stated that "We are going to take control of the economic and political system!"

3) One person, addressing the legal issues facing the group, stated that the group was getting free legal representation from the National Lawyers Guild. As an aside, a dozen or so people from this group were arrested this past week. I've heard rumor, not confirmed, that there is an attorney in town who is under contract with the SEIU to represent those who were arrested.

4) The aforementioned Ted Weisgal told the audience that there was a meeting of the Harris County Green Party being held at his business offices on Monday. He pleaded with the audience to get Houston City Councilmember Jolanda Jones reelected.

Mr. Weisgal's words prompted several people to discuss the issue of whether the movement should work with already established leftist groups, but that was something many seemed to be wary about. I don't know why. They all have the same attitudes.

5) The aforementioned Egberto Willies said that the group had to be prepared for the eventuality that the camp in Tranquility Park, which David visited yesterday and posted about, was going to be shutdown. He asked the audience, "where do we go?" This prompted a lot of negative commentary, but people did seem to come around to Mr. Willies' point.

6) One young man said that, "We are fighting a war on selfishness! We are fighting a war on greed!" I had to stifle a laugh. Ayn Rand adherents would no doubt be laughing too.

7) Talk devolved on what Occupy Houston could do. One woman of Asian descent told the audience that there were many foreclosed homes in Houston. She asked how many could be turned into co-ops? How many homes could be taken over by people squatting in abandoned homes? She suggested to the audience that they should look into RICO prosecutions that have been used against drug dealers and crack houses, and that they should find those crack houses to squat in and take over.

That was just a smattering of what was said. There was considerable concern on outreach and perception of the movement, which was strange because at the same time people were making suggestions that they protest in front of the tall buildings of the oil and gas companies, march through River Oaks, and others were concerned that the 99% / 1% mantra wasn't mobilizing people. Talk arose of what was to come after capitalism, but there were so many things that people talked about that there wasn't anything coherent in terms of strategy that came out of the meeting. One person lamented that nothing had happened, and that there had been no change at all over the last two months since the Occupy movement had started.

There were printed materials available at the meeting. This group has printed 10,000 copies of a broadsheet style newspaper, of which I grabbed about two dozen copies. Another handout was from the Houston chapter of Moveon.org, highlighting a site called Rebuild the American Dream. One was a hard copy print out of the reflections on the Occupy movement by Bob Avakian, who is the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA.

A fire alarm went off in the library at 3:40pm, causing the meeting to have to break up because the building had to be evacuated. A few people muttered that this was done on purpose, but I doubt that. I definitely caught the whiff of smoke coming from somewhere. The group decided to migrate their moveable feast to the front of City Hall. I decided not to follow them, as I had not had anything to eat all day and I went to grab some chow.

So what to make of all this? David says that this group is not a threat. I came away with the impression that all this is the same stale old stuff that the Left has been pushing for 100 years now - no more wars, neuter those evil corporations, while politically demanding an ever more vast centralized welfare and entitlement state that condemns everyone to a new form of slavery. What's amazing is that looking at this "Contract for the American Dream" printout in front of me is how much of this has already been enacted by the all powerful federal government, but that doesn't seem to faze the Move On folks, nor these Occupy folks. This movement decries police brutality used against them, without seeming to realize that this is exactly what they are wanting to impose on everyone else.

I don't know. One day, maybe, this crowd will wake up to the wisdom of Frederic Bastiat, who wrote that the State is the great fiction whereby everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else. Maybe one of these days, this crowd will volunteer to work at a charity or perhaps write a check to help support them. But after watching this meeting today, I sorely doubt it. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même.

Wizard

To wit: Metro incorporated a rail line on Harrisburg back for the 2003 rail referendum to appease the Hispanic voting bloc, who had threatened to vote against Metro's rail plans if the government agency did not build a rail line that went through Hispanic areas of town. And so it was that Metro incorporated a rail line down Harrisburg to appease the wolves and sharks.

But Metro decided not to submit the rail line down Harrisburg for consideration for a federal funding grant from the U.S. FTA. Why, because there were problems from the beginning with running a rail line down Harrisburg. One obvious one was that the East End of Houston is where the ship channel and Port of Houston are, as well as much industry. The area has many environmental problems, which would have been unearthed during an FTA public inquiry because all federal grants must get environmental clearance from the U.S. EPA in order to be eligible for a federal grant. Hence, Metro would have to build this rail line out of its own monies.

That however, wasn't the most visible problem with running a rail line down Harrisburg. Union Pacific Rail Road (UPRR) operates a rail line that runs through the East End, and runs several dozen freight trains that traverse Harrisburg every day. Any Metro rail line would have either go over the UPRR rail tracks or under them. That is what this public meeting was about. Would Metro build the rail line over or under the UPRR rail tracks?

The meeting was packed, standing room only, with maybe 200 or so people showing up and cramming into a small room at the Ripley House. City of Houston Mayor Annise Parker conducted the meeting, with Councilmembers James Rodriguez and Ed Gonzalez also in attendance. City of Houston Public Works director Dan Krueger was there, but did not speak, but the other noteworthy speaker was Metro's CEO, George "Good Government Guy" Greanias.

Parker and Greanias presented attendees with computer visuals of what an overpass and what an underpass of a rail line running under the UPRR rail tracks would look like. Members of the audience argued both for and against each proposal. I was amazed to hear that Metro and the City, which having gone so far as to put orange construction barrels for three miles down Texas Avenue and down to the 5500 block of Harrisburg, and having torn up and repaved parts of Harrisburg itself, have not yet figured out what they are going to do about the UPRR rail line.

Mayor Parker made it clear that she was agnostic about which option Metro chose, but Ma Parker can afford to be agnostic. She has the gun, and screwing a few voters in the East End isn't going to matter to her to much, not in comparison to losing political support from the construction mafia wolves who are a big part of Metro's self promoting, agency created mess. Time tables were given; if the overpass bridge option was chosen, it would cost $32 million, but if an underpass was chosen it would cost $43 million. Mayor Parker told the audience that the Councilmembers present had agreed to give up two projects out of the City CIP (capital improvement plan) to come up with $12 million in monies for building the bridge. Another idea floated would be to create (yet another) TIRZ (tax increment refinancing zone) along Harrisburg, with the hope that increased tax values would be captured and spent on the project. One proposal was to try to lobby the Harris County Commissioners into forming a TIRZ along Harrisburg.

Questions were fielded from the audience, with one woman who was holding a baby questioning in detail about the financial assumptions of the TIRZ, and another person saying that he hoped that the rail line would promote tourism in the East End! Mayor Parker remarked - memorably - that:

There's no magic - It's just a rail line. The market will have to decide whether to put money into the area.

The audience was told that if the overpass was built, that the rail line would likely be completed by 2014, while the overpass would be completed in 2016. Many complained about how long Metro had taken in instigating the construction of rail. Mayor Parker remarked on how uncooperative UPRR was - oh, the horror! - and George Greanias stated that legally that it was doubtful that UPRR had any legal right to operate their rail line along the street. Parker made it clear that she was playing hardball with UPRR, but UPRR wasn't backing down. UPRR is not some podunk, small time Ma and Pa business that would be easy for a big city Mayor to bully around, but rather a huge corporation that earns tens of billions of dollars in revenue hauling billions of tons of freight around every year. When I listened to Mayor Parker speak as she did, thoughts of Atlas Shrugged went through my mind, this time with a big city politician trying to whip up on a railroad that provides an incalculable service to Houston, all in the name of a government agency that has the power to call for elections whose intent is to aggrandize itself by spending billions of dollars of other people's money.

And for what? That, gentle readers, is the true question. One elderly gentleman asked why the federal government was not involved? That question wasn't answered at the meeting, but in addition to the environmental problems posed, it turns out that the ridership forecast for Harrisburg is only 7,750 boardings per day by 2015. 7,750 riders per day for a rail line that will cost about $500 million, which will take away 2 of Harrisburg's 4 lanes unless the City and Metro widen the street, and which will result in 28 of 40 intersections being blocked off unless plans have been or are changed. People getting onto Harrisburg or off from Harrisburg will only be allowed to make right hand turns only. Meanwhile, the #50 Harrisburg bus route has been attracting 4,400 - 5,500 boardings for years, and George Greanias stated at the meeting that Metro is trying to identify $20 million in annual operational cost savings, presumably to pay for the rail line. And where is that $20 million in cost savings going to come from? Most likely Metro is going to end up cutting bus service, as they have before.

After the meeting was over, I drove for several miles along Harrisburg and looked at the blocked off lanes, the orange construction barrels, and the businesses whose access to the street have all been blocked off. It struck me that the evening's public meeting was held on Navigation, a street nearly a mile away from Harrisburg, that everyone had gotten to the meeting by cars even with the price of gas at nearly $4 per gallon, and for which light rail would be useless to get to.

It's really sad to see Harrisburg, and indeed Houston itself, go through so much agony for so little return. But such are the joys of modern day American Progressivism, which being the heir of a movement that was launched 100 years ago and which has continually promoted the use of State power ostensibly for the public good, has long since done all the productive useful things that government could conceive of doing, but has created a pile of interest groups in the process and who now demand to continue to be fed at the table like wolves and sharks. To try to continue pacifying these groups, today's Progressives insist on resorting to grand projects with big price tags, like light rail, but which have little or no value, and try to use Democracy as a way to justify it all. That may be a reason why companies like Exxon Mobil are leaving the City of Houston for the distant suburbs, and why Houston only garnered 20 percent of the population gains of all of Harris County between 2000 and 2010.

What Houstonians see with Metro is a microcosm of what Americans see happening in Washington, and today's Progressivism will do nothing but impoverish everyone.

After all, there's no magic in it - It's just a rail line....

Wizard

METRO is hosting a series of public workshops to discuss the future of transit in our region. We’re working with communities throughout our service area to learn where service is needed and how we can modify or add to existing service to better serve the needs of the community.

Metro goes on to invite Houstonians to:

Share your vision for tomorrow. Attend a METRO public workshop to discuss the future of transit in your community.

So, the Wizard did. I attended the workshop held on May 12th on Richmond Avenue. I really didn't expect anything new that I didn't know already. The Metroettes (employees of Metro who attend public events put on by the agency) were out in force as usual. A heavy set man, who lived in the area but whom I had never met before, said to me at one point that it seemed like many people who were in attendance were Metro employees. I told him he must be new to the world of Metro.

There really wasn't much to report that Examiner reporter Mike Reed didn't cover. Yes, the Kim Slaughter did make a comment about transportation coming down to roads or rail, and yes City of Houston Oliver Pennington did say that half of Houstonians were opposed to any rail.

Metro was soliciting comments and input, which of course doesn't matter to Metro because there are other things that matter much more to the agency than the opinions of one or two dozen Houstonians who show up to each of these meetings. I'm willing to bet $100 that no more than 1,000 residents show up to all 24 of these so called workshops, which goes to show how relevant the agency really is to most Houstonians.

But I digress, because there's something else that needs to be asked about Metro's public workshops that's more important than the agency sending out its PR department on a political fishing expedition to test the public mood, and that is, quite frankly, why is the agency bothering to do this in the first place?

Seven and a half years ago, Metro spent $6 million in sales tax dollars before the November 2003 election (and arguably broke Texas law which prohibits agencies from spending tax dollars to promote agendas) to politically sell Houstonians on a comprehensive regional transit plan, the centerpiece of which was to be 64 miles of light rail, along with more HOV lanes, 50 percent more bus routes, and so on. The voters approved the plan, much the delight of both the Houston Chronicle editorial board and to Metro itself. But that was supposed to be the plan!

So what the hell is Metro doing out here now? After all, Metro has been around for 32 years now, but for some reason Metro needs to learn how to modify existing services for transit? This is the sort of stuff that people get when you have a government agency, which has a gun at its disposal, but whose real purpose is to be the plaything of the ruling political coalition which has captured local government.

The older I get, the more I think that Metro, which was voted into existence in 1978 (which came just a few years after a previous failed attempt to vote it into existence), is just one of thousands of manifestations of the 20th Century Progressive vision that America had to have more democracy. Government had to take over more and more functions in America, and all of this had to be legitimized by democracy. So, the big government loving Texans of the late 1970's wrote section 451 of the Texas Transportation Code, such that agencies that were voted into existence would be ruled over by boards which could call elections for transit plans, in much the same way that government school boards call for elections to sell bonds to build expensive shiny new schools.

Rorschach has said over and over again that one of the big problems that those who fight statism have to face is that every time something comes up for an election, the liberty types fighting elections have to get lucky every single time, while all the promoters of statism have to do is get lucky just once. And so it is when you set up lots of boards and agencies, and grant them the power to call elections. If the interest groups fail to get what they want at the ballot box, there's always the next election where you can try, try again. Once the interest groups hit the political jackpot, win their election and get what they want, the door slams shut and the voters are not allowed to look back no matter how rotten the government acts, and in the process the voters who show up during that election effectively commit future generations to pony up for what they've done.

And so it has been with Metro. Since the November 2003 election Metro has blown through some $700 million in local and federal tax dollars, but has only "just started work" on three rail lines, according to Ms. Slaughter. But hey, guess what? Metro now feels the need to go out into the community and - get this - get their opinion!

Thoughts turn to Erik Ibarra and Lauren Barrash, and their struggles to provide private transportation to Houstonians. The market and their customers tell them how they are doing, and they pay attention because they don't have guns at their disposal.

Now, the Texas Legislature does have a provision whereby agencies and boards can be subject to sunset review, but once agencies and boards are voted into existence, they have interests of their own, and so it was that Metro got itself exempted from being subject to sunset review. Meanwhile, the Texas Transportation Code offers no provision for voters to dissolve Metro, no matter how egregious the agency's acts are.

And so Houstonians are now treated to the spectacle of Metro, going about town, holding their workshops with their posters sitting on easels and tripods, giving long suffering Houstonians who bother to show up and chat with the squads of Metroettes yet another sermon on the alleged necessity of needing a government transit agency - an agency which after 32 years, still needs "to learn where service is needed and how we can modify or add to existing service to better serve the needs of the community."

Addendum edit (5/23/2011): Kevin links to this entry adding that

It's quite the approach to "customer" service!

But that's the whole point to this rant. Metro doesn't have customers. Who needs customers when you have stakeholders?

Wizard

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.

The NCAA tournament is being held at Reliant Stadium, while free music concerts are being put on at Discovery Green. More events are being staged at the George R. Brown convention center. The Houston Chronicle, which has been an apologist for statism for decades, is trumping up how the Metropolitan Transit Authority is planning on putting buses on the Main Street rail line route to accommodate the anticipated extra riders on to go back and forth between these government buildings and parks at taxpayer expense.

Now that my anti-government rant part of this blog entry is over, I'll ask why it is that Metro is having to put buses on the route to handle the extra passengers, as one of the political rationales for building rail on Main Street at taxpayer expense was that doing so got rid of thousands of bus trips every day along the corridor, right? But, the Chronicle is reporting that Metro is going to run two rail car trains along Main Street, instead of one rail car.

But a question needs to be posed. Why stop at two rail cars, if Metro is anticipating extra transit riders along the corridor?

Well gentle readers, the Wizard is glad you asked that question, because it turns out that if Metro were to try running trains with three rail cars on them, instead of 1 or 2, then the agency runs into a bit of a problem. You see, the trains would then be too long for them to operate along Main Street.

Here's the deal: The rail cars that Metro operates were built by Siemens. As the Wikipedia entry for Houston's Metro Rail notes, the rail cars are 96 feet long, so a two rail car train is 192 feet long. A three car train would be 288 feet (or 96 yards) long, and those numbers do not include any connections or hitches between the rail cars. Furthermore, the train stations have to be longer than the rail cars in order to accommodate potential passengers. The train stations that are envisioned by Metro to handle trains with two cars for the other corridors are roughly 220 feet long.

The problem posed with trains that are three rail cars long is that as every Houstonian knows, the streets in downtown Houston are laid out in a grid, and the length of the grid blocks in downtown Houston are right around - you guessed it - 100 yards. That means that if Metro were to try to run trains that were three rail cars long, the trains (and the train stations) would potentially be blocking vehicle traffic that would be running in an east - west perpendicular direction to the trains running in a north - south direction. There are almost certainly similar problems to be found in placing train stations along the other corridors where Metro wants to build rail.

What this means is that Metro is boxed in by the current built environment in downtown Houston with regards to how many rail cars they can run with one train. That in turn will cause a ripple effect that will limit the passenger capacity that will affect any and all expansions to rail in Houston. Train stations will be hemmed in by the layout of the current street grid, and the only way to get around such problems posed by building rail at-grade would be to completely cut off streets where they now intersect with any of the streets along which Metro wants to run rail. Hence, that in turn would mean cutting off vehicle mobility along any corridor that Metro wants to build rail.

Of course, such issues can be gotten around by elevating rail, or building subways, but then you are talking about a 2-5 fold increase in the price tag to taxpayers. Alternately, Metro can attempt to run trains at-grade with greater frequency (i.e. with shorter headways), but that in turn might cause more traffic disruption, and it would cause Metro to have consider adding more power capacity on the grid to run more trains.

And so it is that Metro will be running buses on my dime to abet the capacity of Metro's Main Street train to ferry out-of-towners to go have their entertainment.

Wizard

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

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.

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....

Why Labor Unions, and what they're after

A good question to start off this discussion is this: what are labor unions after? It's a simple question, but if we're going to have anything resembling a rational analysis of what's going on in Wisconsin (or about labor unions at all), we're going to have to go back to first things first. The answer is simple: labor unions organize, presumably to help their members achieve a better life, whether that can be achieved through better working conditions, better pay, better non-wage benefits, more vacation time, shorter working hours, or by some other means.
So, a big question for labor unions is, how do you go about achieving your goals? A second, but more subtle question I will ask, but not address here is this: Would competitive labor markets secure what unions would otherwise be after?

In an economy that is organized around markets, and to a large degree the United States economy is still organized around markets, people are for the most part paid at their marginal level of productivity. If you can make 10 widgets per hour and get paid $10 per hour, but then figure out a way to make 15 widgets per hour with all other things being held constant or with nothing changing, then you will eventually start getting paid for your higher level of productivity.

This idea or principle makes life difficult for would be labor unions. If your goal is to improve compensation for the workers in your labor union, then either you have to figure out a way to make them more productive, or else you're going to have to figure out ways to force would be employers to start compensating workers more.

Yes, labor unions do offer training and educational courses for apprentices in some of the construction trades, but for the most part labor unions choose to do the latter. In the parlance of economics, labor unions engage in what is known as rent seeking.

So what things do labor unions do to try to compel employers to reward them more than they would otherwise? There are a number of different things that labor unions do, and they do them for different reasons. First, one must recognize that competition in labor markets is an anathema to labor unions. Therefore, the logical thing for labor unions to do would be to act in such ways that stomp out the competition and yes, the Wizard knows - corporations and business do the same thing, but if you think about the matter carefully, sometimes the interests of business and labor unions meld together!

So, how would a labor union go about shutting out the competition via the political process?

1) Go to elected officials and get them to pass closed shop legislation, or alternately union shop legislation, which would outlaw non-union competition labor in the labor market. The Wikipedia entry notes that Closed Shops are outlawed in the United States after the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 was passed, which in turn amended the Roosevelt Era National Labor Relations Act. More about this later.

2) Shut down anything resembling free trade with other countries, as trade invites competition, but it also frees up resources for people to pursue gains to be had via comparative advantages. That's why labor unions went berserk when their man, Bill Clinton, managed to push through the NAFTA free trade agreement back at the beginning of 1994.

3) Try to attempt to interfere with the free movement of capital, since business can invest their money in places where there is non-union labor competition or labor union unfriendly legislation in place, such as right to work states, or investing in other countries. Unions have largely not been able to prevent the movement of capital.

4) Employ the political process and the law to create barriers to entry into the job field in order to reduce the number of people who can legally enter and practice in the job field. Doctors and lawyers come to mind, and doctors voted to unionize in America back in 1999. Licensing of workers is widespread in union dominated job fields, including employing the use of teaching certificates to be employed as a teacher, and licensing in the construction trades.

5) Labor unions will often support such ideas as minimum wage laws. Why? Because gentle readers, minimum wage laws are a floor on the price of labor, ergo some people who might be willing to work in labor markets for lower than the minimum wage will be banned from doing so, which diminishes competitive pressures in labor markets.

But this isn't the end of economic analysis of labor unions. As we have seen, unions try to justify their existence by increasing compensation for their members, but in order to do that, it implies that unions will form in organizations and markets that will be around for a while. People who want to form labor unions will not bother to waste their time organizing for spot markets, say for example, fire works stands (which pop up for the Fourth of July and for New Years, but are dormant for the rest of the year). Instead, labor unions will target situations where they can sit down and dig their claws into. Examples include the automobile industry, which has been a huge economic force now for the past 100 years, the oil and gas industry (or more carefully, the oil refining industry), employment at shipping ports (which could be around for centuries), and yes - governments.

In other words, what labor unions want is a marketplace where there will be an inelastic demand curve for the labor that the labor union provides. That in turn means that unions can really only thrive in an environment where the factors of economic productivity are stuck in place, or stuck in country. Anything that promotes mobility of economic productivity is a death sentence to unions, whether those factors are people or investment capital. It's impossible to capture economic rents when productive factors are mobile and can run away from you.

Governments are particularly attractive for labor unions simply because they have a monopoly on force, and once formed they stay stuck in place and never go away - unless they are overthrown! Talk about setting up an inelastic demand curve for union labor! The London Tube system has been around for over 100 years, and yes, the labor union that Tube workers belong to has been very successful at extracting rents. The City of Houston was founded in 1836, and received its home rule charter in 1905, and doesn't look to be dissolved any time soon.

More pertinent to what's happening in Wisconsin (and in Ohio, and it may well come to Texas within the next month or two), attendance at government schools is compulsory and is enshrined in law for 12-13 years of a child's life in many places around the world. In Texas, Chapter 25,094 of the state education code makes failure to attend school a Class C misdemeanor offense, punishable by up to a $500 fine. The legal compulsory universal attendance of school literally sets up a politically created market, composed of a never ending river of kids that will go through the system, that literally will never end as long as kids are compelled to attend school by state fiat. It should be absolutely of no surprise to anyone that eventually school district employees around the country eventually unionized. They knew they were going to be there today, and that their jobs were guaranteed to be around tomorrow, so why not sit around and unionize and start extracting some economic rents via the political process?

More to the point, compulsory schooling and its drawing of education into the political economy, has turned schools into jobs programs. This past week, the Wizard attended a forum in the Texas Capitol, where I picked up a booklet about Texas government schools. The booklet stated that 665,000 Texans were employed by the Kindergarten - grade 12 school system, with 4.8 million kids enrolled, with a little over 50 percent of those employees being actual teachers. Maximum student to teacher ratios are in fact enshrined in section 25.111 of the Texas education code at 20-1, making for a rigid regime, and guaranteeing that vast taxpayer resources are to be dedicated towards schools (albeit, to be fair to Texas government school teachers, they are not members of unions). In fact K-12 government schools in Texas (and America) employ some 6-7 percent of all Americans in the labor force, and as we are witnessing in Wisconsin, when you have that many people employed by the state, they (and their spouses and families) become powerful voting blocs to be reckoned with.

And that leads the Wizard to his next topic, which is....

A short history of labor unions in America, the law, and assaults on freedom of contract

Labor unions were not around at the time of America's Founding, though there were earlier versions of what could be classified as labor groups. Many countries in the Middle Ages had trade guilds, which could be seen as a form of unionism (as well as cartelism).

But the modern version of what we've come to know as unionism really got its start a little over 100 years ago, and particular when the legal assaults on the freedom of contract were waged and prosecuted over a period of some 60 years. University of Chicago law Professor Richard Epstein artfully describes how this assault occurred in his book, How the Progressives Rewrote the Constitution. The opening skirmish in labor unionism and labor law was in the famous case of Lochner vs. State of New York, which invalidated state laws to regulate working hours.

But the Progressives didn't stop their attacks on freedom of contract, and they usually employed moralistic tones when pushing through their legislation that started placing curbs in freedom to contract, such as in the prized political achievement of outlawing child labor. Now, most Americans living today would be horrified at the prospect of children working, but it's quite easy for us to forget amidst our lavish wealth that children were (and in some areas of the world still are) sent to pick the fruit and work the fields since time immemorial.

Moreover, and this is extremely important, Professor Epstein notes in his book that child labor in America was already on the decline while the Progressive era was unfolding! In other words, the legislation prohibiting child labor was largely unneeded for the simple fact that parents of the era were starting to recognize that the jobs of the future were going to require that kids learn their readin', writin', and 'rithmatic, and that it would be a better thing if they started investing time and effort educating their children, rather than send them off to work a job.

But what was important is that America was stuck with the precedent of using legislation to assail the freedom of contract, and once you start traveling down that road, each legal step along with way is justified by the previous step, and each step enshrines state action.

But freedom to contract was not only assailed through child labor laws. Over time, labor unions were granted more rights enshrined in law, culminating in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (aka the Wagner Act). It was this act that established that workers and unions could engage in collective bargaining with private employers, but even the New York Times notes that Franklin Roosevelt did not go so far as to allow within the law for unions to engage in collective bargaining with governments, calling the idea "unthinkable and intolerable." But it wasn't until 1959 that states first started allowing for government employees to engage in collective bargaining with elected officials, and ironically the first state to do so was.... the State of Wisconsin. But the practice soon spread, and now we have numerous states that are hemorrhaging in red ink from underfunded pension woes, a problem that lurked out there until it was - like so much - finally brought out into the open by this ongoing recession.

So why was there so much political and legal support for collective bargaining? One big insight can be gleaned from reading a passage in Professor Epstien's book, where Epstein quotes former Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who wrote in 1920 in the Yale Law Review:

"Collective Bargaining" is the starting point of the solution and not the solution itself. This principle must, of course, receive ungrudging acceptance. It is nothing but belated recognition of economic facts - that the era of romantic individualism is no more. These are not days of Hans Sachs, the village cobbler and artist, man and meistersinger. We are confronted with mass production and mass producers; the individual, in his industrial relations, but a cog in the great collectivity. The collectivity, must be represented and must be allowed to choose its representatives. And it is through the collectivity, through enlisting its will and its wisdom, that the necessary increase in production alone will come. Needless energy is wasted, precious time is lost, precious feelings are diverted and disturbed by the necessity of fighting for the acceptance of the principle of collective bargaining instead of working out the means and methods of its application.

In other words, according this world view expressed by Frankfurter mirrors the world view of the "Progressives" of 100 years ago. Much like how John Maynard Keynes created an economic theory that emphasized an economy that was composed of nothing but aggregates, America (and indeed the world) was, according to the Progressives, filled with nothing more than empires of massive corporate employers, employing faceless masses of people, all doing soulless and meaningless work. The only way forward in this new, 20th century, mass industrial world was to allow the troops to organize themselves into a mob empowered by Democracy, and, if it came down to it, hold the big evil employer at ransom if that's what it came down to it. Yes, unions are thuggish. After all, this was politics, and in this new world there was no room for the individual. Such ideas - and that included the freedom to contract - were held by Progressives to be antiquated and belonged to the horse and buggy world of 1776 and 1789. Congress in modern day America was now held to have the power to do anything needed to alleviate any alleged miseries and alleged social problems, all in the name of the public welfare, and government solutions to problems ultimately involve socializing costs and enacting some form of collectivism. That's what the Progressives dumped on America, and that's what they're still fighting for.

But what about now and what about the future?

The Tea Party movement erupted in late 2008 - early 2009, in part because big corporations like General Motors and Chrysler, along with their labor union employees, were being bailed out instead of being allowed to fail when the American economy went south, and for when there wasn't a desire to buy their products. The perception amongst millions of Americans (and that perception was in fact the reality) was that Congress, and President's Bush and Obama, were bailing out favored and privileged groups, while sticking the taxpayers with the bill. What we are seeing now in Wisconsin, and which will probably spread to other states, is round two of what happened two years ago: that another group of workers, this time employees of the government who are in the political economy, who are ostensibly paid to educate kids, are also fighting to hold onto privileges that they've been granted via the political process, and that they somehow believe that they should be immune to the economic forces that have wiped some 8 million jobs away from the American private sector economy.

One issue that freedom minded Americans, and that includes Tea Party members, are going to have to confront is the issue of government involvement in education. I've discovered over the past two years that there are plenty of people (including Republicans and Tea Party members) who believe in the status-quo, and that includes State government mandates that the state is to compel kids to attend school by force of law. At a deep and fundamental level, such an idea is incompatible with true liberty and freedom.

It may well be that for the meantime with regards to State governments, liberty fighters will have to content themselves with merely holding back against the powerful wave of constituencies, including Medicaid recipients and the medical profession, as well as fierce political demands to keep things as they are for the government school empire. I'm not sure how many Americans are ready to deal with home schooling their children, or putting them in private schools, which would be the ideal solution for dealing with the problem of government schools and government school labor unions. My suspicion is that many business leaders also politically support government schools, on the precept that they would be afraid of what kind of labor force they would get should the government school system be abandoned.

Having said that, America has in general managed to mute much of what labor unionism did in the private sector. Companies can move their investments away from labor union disruptions and reach, and the marketplace can always act to discipline participants. Union membership is at an all time low, and is not expected to come back. Most Americans seem to understand and accept the idea that they are not entitled to their jobs, and that's important. That idea now has to be enacted and extended to government.

Wizard

Much has happened since the Wizard laid down his poison pen keyboard. Just two nights ago, Mr. Obama made his State of the Union address to America, something that Becky reminds us that only our first two Presidents did before Presidents simply started writing reports to Congress. Then came Woodrow Wilson, who started making an annual appearance before Congress, and all Presidents did so. She then links to a book that says that America's Imperial Presidency started with Wilson.

But the Wizard digresses. Actually, Mr. Obama's State of the Union address isn't the most exciting thing going on in the world right now, nor will America's budget problems be the most exciting issue in the year 2011. So what is, pray tell? The answer, gentle readers, is that we are not even finished with the first month of 2011, and already 2011 is shaping up to be the year that people all across the Arab world may finally rise up and overthrow the despots that have kept them in chains. 2011 will be the most exciting year in world affairs since 1989, when the Communist bloc of Eastern European countries finally threw off the yoke of 45 years of rule from the Soviet Union, in addition to revolts that happened in Burma, the Philippines, and in China.

First, less than two weeks ago, citizens in Tunisia rose up and overthrew the government of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, because citizens were demanding jobs and an end to corruption. Mr. Ben Ali, who had won five consecutive terms in office, with between 90 - 99 percent of the vote, then subsequently fled to Saudi Arabia, whose rulers had suggested that he keep his nerves and talk to the rioters.

Word comes from Britain's Daily Telegraph that the rioting started when a young man set himself on fire after having his fruit and vegetable stand - his meager livelihood - taken from him because, you guessed it, he didn't have a license. And you know what that means, don't you? That means that this was done because of that hoary old excuse that all governments use, which was that the government has to protect the public. It goes without saying that the state needed to pinch a few dinars off the poor young man through granting the license, and grant him the privilege to operate his meager fruit stand.

In other words, it is critical that we understand where the spark came from with respect to why this unrest has exploded.

Now, the news has come that this Tunisia effect has spread to Jordan, Yemen, and most notably Egypt, where the long time government of Honsi Mubarak has ruled under emergency rule for 30 years.

The Wizard has been keeping up with the technology side of this, as Slashdot reported that Twitter services, then phone and Internet access have been shut down by Mubarak's government.

Based on early analysis, the causes of all this unrest have different sources, and their outcomes will probably vary as well. In Jordan, citizens are protesting high food prices and corruption, while in Yemen the fight is over "proposed constitutional amendments that would abolish presidential term limits and the timing of the upcoming parliamentary election in April", according to the Christian Science Monitor. The CSM story reports that the opposition will refuse to take part in elections this year if these proposed political changes take place. In Egypt, the issues are poverty and corruption, along with the fact that Mubarak has ruled for 30 years ever since he took control over the country after Sadat was assassinated.

All this unrest puts America into a conundrum. Some of the rationale that American neo-conservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan gave for getting America stuck in the swamp morass invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was that America had to have a muscular foreign policy that included promotion of democracy, free markets, and liberty. The problem with this idea is that the regimes that we were recognizing, like Mubarak's, were and are effectively "soft dictatorships" (for a lack of a better term), which were most likely backed by America for fear that something worse would take their place, at least from the point of view from Washington. Statecraft is an ugly business, but no doubt that Egyptians are wondering whether the posture that America's political leaders would mean that their demands are seen as illegitimate from America's view.

But this still does not explore the entirely of the situation. We do not yet know what the outcomes of these protests and riots will be, nor do we know how far this unrest will spread. Just several days ago, Sheik Al Sabah of Kuwait made a sudden announcement of a 1,000 dinar ($3,559 in U.S. dollar) handout to all Kuwaiti citizens, stating that this was in celebration of several national milestones, including 50 years of independence, and the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion that drove out Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.

Hmmm....

A true libertarian would say, well all this is not America's problem. The problem with that supposition is that we never quite know if the political leaders of other countries might try to make all this unrest America's problem, or whether protesters may see America as part of the problem, such as is suggested in this Wikileaks story in Forbes. Other issues may arise, such as whether the unrest will spread to Saudi Arabia. But, at the same time, this unrest is so widespread that there may well be little that America can do, other than to simply let the chips fall where they may and then deal with matters after the dust settles. It should go without saying that the world is watching what Mr. Obama is going to do, because these events will show what kind of person he really is.

Then there is the very important matter of whether America should do anything about this. That in turn breaks down into whether you look at the rising unrest from the perspective that the people of the Arabian world are rising up to overthrow dictators, or whether you think America must continue to tend to the military and economic interests via Realpolitick.

One thing that all this unrest underscores is that America needs to get its own domestic financial house in order, lest our staggering $1.5 trillion per year federal deficits finally spiral out of control and leave our country vulnerable to the winds of the world. The bills of the welfare and entitlement state that was created in the 20th century, and which today's "Progressives" are still trying to push even further, are now coming due, and that in turn means that America needs - for our children's sake - to have a self examination of what our government is really all about.

Addendum: The Sydney Morning Herald has a very interesting take on the rapidly developing events in Egypt, noting that

[U.S. Secretary of State Hilary]Clinton uttered the ''stability'' line early in the week - before the seriousness of what is unfolding in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria came in to focus. Consider how it might be interpreted by ordinary Egyptians - the human rights of 80 million people have been trampled for 30 years but what the US Secretary of State is most concerned about is the stability of the state.

By now, gentle readers will know issues the Texas Legislature will have on its agenda: How will Republicans govern with a huge majority of 99-51 in the Texas House? Redistricting the district boundary lines for both state and federal elected officials will consume much time. Ever since the State of Arizona passed its legislation on border issues, there has been much clamor on the political right to address the Texas-Mexico border. There will be a renewed push for photo identification for voters, but the perhaps the biggest issue that is really making everyone nervous is what the Texas Legislature will do about a possible $20+ billion shortfall in the state budget.

A brief digression. Texas, like nearly all other states but unlike the runaway federal government, has a state constitutional requirement that its budgets are balanced. States do not have printing presses at hand, unlike Congress which has the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve at its disposal. In one of the early American Republic's first economic crises, the panic of 1837, many American states went into default. The fallout from that economic recession was nearly all U.S. states adopted fairly strict budgetary rules against any kind of official long term borrowing. On paper, the books have to balance.

So how did the State of Texas find itself in such a fiscal mess that it is in now? Perhaps the best source for overall budget issues is to visit the Texas Budget Source website. There, one can find trends in State government, as well as what the State spends on general line item appropriations. The website also has links to the budgets of cities, counties, school districts, and other special purpose districts. What a website!

A general overview of the state budget quickly shows that the "mommy" issues of state funding of schools and health care predominate the state budget. The two year, 2010-2011 state budget was set during the 2009 Legislature at $182 billion. $75.5 billion of this was state funding of education, with $53 billion going to local government school districts and the other $22 billion going to universities and higher education. Another $60 billion went to "health and human services", meaning mostly government funded medical care. Of that figure, nearly $34 billion came from the federal government in the form of federal taxpayer monies that were redirected by Congress to the state. So, of the $182 billion state budget, government schools and HHS funding (primarily of health care) amounted to $135 billion or nearly 75 percent of the state budget. Moreover, 37 percent of the state budget, some $68 billion, came from Congress.

Other item of interest is that the Texas budget source website clearly shows that it is government funding of health care and schools that are the drivers of the budget. The HHS budget has grown from $30 billion in 2000-2001 to nearly $60 billion over the past 10 years, while state funding of education has grown from $45 billion to $75 billion over the same time period. The state population has grown from some 20.8 million in 2000 to some 25 million in 2010. An online inflation calculator shows that inflation from 2000-2010 was 28 percent. Putting a combination of population growth and inflation pressures reveals that overall state funding of schools has somewhat outstripped population growth and inflation, but state funding of health and human services has way outstripped population growth and inflation.

Combine all this spending growth, along with their massive political constituencies, and put it together with a slow economy, and presto! the state gets a big budget deficit.

A big story that made the headlines over the past week was that in order to close the $20 billion gap in state financing, some lawmakers were considering the idea of having the state drop out of the federal Medicaid program. The New York Times story noted that early indications were that dropping out of the program would have a tremendous financial ripple effect.

Consider this: Progressives manage to pass a U.S. constitutional amendment in 1913 imposing an income tax on Americans. Then over the next 100 years, a vast array of programs get enacted by Congress, whereby Washington distributes hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the state governments, whose own residents were the ones who paid those dollars in the first place. So, the game is often set up whereby state governments roll over and do what Washington says, if only to capture those dollars for their stated purpose. In the process, the states effectively became nothing more than appendages of the federal government.

As a Tea Party person, one question to be asked is this: Is Medicaid constitutional? I hate to pester people with this, but no doubt the progressives would reply that, yes it is! Why? They'd probably hang their hats on the usual suspects - the ever expanding Commerce Clause and Congress's taxing powers. Not to mention that as long as the New York Times thinks that me being forced to pay for somebody else's nursing home care is a good idea, and because it's a good idea in their opinion, then gosh darnit, it's constitutional!

Medicaid, as the Wikipedia entry notes, was enacted in 1965, as part of the massive wave of Great Society programs. Whereas Medicare was envisioned as yet another social insurance Ponzi scheme add on to the Social Security Ponzi scheme, Medicaid was a straight shot welfare program for the poor. Medicaid is jointly funded by Washington and the states, and on paper the states administer the programs. Participation in Medicaid by the states is voluntary, but once again, if a state government decides not to participate in Medicaid, then effectively that state government is surrendering the income tax monies of their residents to Washington, and neither the citizens of the state nor the state government itself will recapture back those dollars when the state government refuses to participate in Medicaid. Those federal general revenue income tax dollars will almost certainly go to another state or they will be reallocated to another program. In other words, the effect of Medicaid is that a big federal government program leads to big state government, and setting this arrangement up the way the Progressives did was done on purpose. After all, when you've gamed the system this way, why would any state bother to not throw in the towel and start participating in Medicaid?

One big item that was only glossed over in the Times article was what recently transpired in American health care - the passage of Obama Care. The (misnamed) Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act of 2009 legislated many things, as any 2,700 page long piece of legislation would, and one big thing that Obama Care legislated was an expansion of 20 million Americans who would eligible for Medicaid, $1,300,000,000,000 per year federal budget deficits be damned and state governments be damned. In other words, one of the things that Congress did was dump a massive unfunded mandate on the states and told them that it was their problem to deal with it. Since Texas has eight percent of the country's population, it is quite likely that the state will be compelled under Obama Care to add another 1-2 million residents to Medicaid under Obama Care, and when you're facing a $20 billion budget deficit already, then hard choices have to be made.

When seen in this light, the floating of the idea by Texas legislators of dropping out of Medicaid entirely deserves a new look. It's not as though Medicaid (or Social Security or Medicare for that matter) is some great achievement. Reason magazine has further reading here, here, and especially this article where some studies show that getting your health care taken care of by Medicaid often results in worse outcomes!

So what would happen if the state of Texas were to drop out of Medicaid? Of course the federal government would then keep several tens of billions of dollars of Texas residents income tax dollars, but the state would be free of federal mandates. The state would then have liberated its citizens to look for private solutions (at the cost of ransoming up its citizens' federal income tax dollars), or the state could figure out some new solution to deal with the issues that Medicaid purports to address. The state would regain much greater control over its own fiscal destiny, not being driven by a major mandate from a overbearing Washington that refuses to get its own fiscal house in order before dumping more mandates on Americans in some fit of Cloward - Pivenism.

Wizard

The Wizard finds it strange that a local government would have the authority to vote on whether a private business should increase or decrease the price it charges for it's product, but government meddling in the electrical utility industry has been rife ever since electricity itself was discovered and harnessed over 120 years ago. Perhaps the most egregious interference in the industry was the long standing granting of monopolies to certain utility providers, something that started early in the 20th century. The industry was largely stuck in this natural monopoly mode until the late 1990's, when reform proposals opening up the provision of electrical power finally were enacted, allowing buyers to choose from many sellers of electrical power.

The rationale for rejecting the idea that the provision of electrical power was a natural monopoly came from the fact that certain large scale businesses found that they were able to generate their own power via cogeneration. The delivery grid, however, often still remains in the hands of one entity, in this case Center Point. One sticking point that came up during the attempts at deregulation or re- regulation was the issue of stranded costs and whether a utility was to be compensated for them. In Texas, utilities that had substantial stranded costs did in fact win authorization to charge for compensation for stranded costs.

But I digress. What was interesting in this story was what that an attorney that was hired by Council to review the rate adjustment:

said rates could go down by as much as $182.8 million. He said CenterPoint is seeking too high an investment return, and other city experts say the utility should consider taking an "austerity adjustment" to share the burden of tough economic times.

Then there's this gem towards the bottom of the article:

The biggest chunk of the utility's increase the city takes issue with is $52 million meant to cover pension-related expenses and liabilities. CenterPoint is trying to inappropriately recover investment losses on the backs of ratepayers, Hall said.

So, on one hand Houstonians have a City government that has raised water rates that it will charge residents by 35 percent over the next four years, and now has a group of politically connected engineers who have put a charter amendment on the November 2010 ballot, which would impose a new drainage levy. But on the other hand, the City is arguing that Center Point Energy must not be allowed to raise the rates it charges for electricity and should take an austerity adjustment due to tough economic times.

Translation, do as we say, not as we do, because the City needs the money while Center Point Energy must do without. This is just another reason why Houstonians should read my blog entry and vote against Proposition 1.

Wizard

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