despotism (4)

REDUCING A GREAT REPUBLIC TO DESPOTISM

HOW TO DEFEAT A RISING DESPOTISM

BY LARRY ARNN, PRESIDENT, HILLSDALE COLLEGE

I have hesitated to submit this because it is rather long, and because, only being able to use one hand to type, it is laborious to transcribe it here.  I have sent this verbatim, including punctuation and paragraph structure, and not one word, other than this exclamation, is original to myself.

This is an adaptation of a speech given by Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College to an audience in Overland Park, Kansas on November 18, 2021 and sent out in print form in their publication, Imprimis. 

Here are two questions pertinent to our times: (1) How would you reduce the greatest free republic in history to despotism in a short time? and (2) How would you stop that from happening?  The answer to the first question has been provided in these last two disastrous years.  The answer to the second has begun to emerge in recent months.  Both are worthy of study.

REDUCING A GREAT REPUBLIC TO DESPOTISM

To establish despotism in a nation like ours, you might begin, if you are smart, by building a bureaucracy of great complexity that commands a large percentage of the resources of the nation.  You might give it rule making powers, distributed across many agencies and centers inside the cabinet departments of government, as well as in 20 or more "independent" agencies-meaning independent of elected officials, and thus independent of the people.

This much has been done.  It would require a doctoral thesis to list all the ways that rules are made in our federal government today, which would make for boring reading.  The truth is that very few people not directly involved know how all this works.  Although civics education is practically banned in America, most people still know what the Congress is and how its members are elected.  But how many know how the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) came to be, under what authority it operates, and who is its head?  Here is a clue: it is not Anthony Fauci.

Admittedly, this new kind of bureaucratic government would take-has taken- decades to erect, especially in the face of the resistance of the Constitution of the United States, which its very existence violates.  but once it has been erected, things can happen very fast.

What, for example, if a new virus proliferates around the world?  There have been procedures for dealing with such viruses for a long time.  They begin with isolating the sick and protecting the vulnerable.  But suddenly we have new procedures that attempt to isolate everybody.  This is commanded by the CDC, an element of this bureaucratic structure, and by a maze of federal and state authorities, all of which see the benefit to themselves in getting involved.  The result is that large sections of our economy were closed for months at a time, and citizens placed under the equivalent of house arrest.  This has not happened before.  The cost of it, and not just in monetary terms, is beyond calculation.

To set up a despotism capable of pulling this off you would need the media's help.  Those controlling the media today are trained in the same universities that invented the bureaucratic state, the same universities the senior bureaucrats attended.  The media would need to suppress, for example, the fact that 50,000 doctors, scientists, and medical researchers signed the Great Barrington Declaration.  That document reminds people that you cannot suppress a widely disseminated contagious virus through shutdowns and mass isolation, and that if you try, you will work immeasurable destructions of new kinds-unemployment, bankruptcy, depression, suicide, multiplying public debt, broken supply chains, and increases of other serious health problems.  Some of the signatories to this Declaration come from the most distinguished universities in the world, but never mind: their views do not fit the narrative propagated by the powerful.  They have been effectively cancelled, ignored by the media and suppressed by Big Tech.

You would need some help from business too.  As far as influence is concerned, "business" is dominated by large institutions-those comprising big business- whose leaders are also educated in the same universities that conceived bureaucratic government and trained the bureaucrats and media heads.  This provides a ground of agreement between big business and the bureaucratic state.  Anyway, agree or not, businesses are vulnerable to regulation, and to mitigate the risk of regulatory harm they play the game: they send lobbyists to Washington, make political contributions, hire armies of lawyers.  If you are big enough to play the game, there are plenty of advantages to be won.  If you are not big enough to play the game-well, in that case you are on your own.

Amidst the unprecedented lockdowns, imagine there comes an election, a time for the people to say if they approve of the new way of government and of this vast, unprecedented intrusion into our lives.  Then let us say that in several states the election rules and practices are altered by their executive branches-the people in charge of enforcing the law-on their own, without approval by their legislatures.  Say this brazen violation of the separation of powers takes place in the name of the pandemic.  One does not need to know what percentage of votes in the final tally were affected to see that this is fishy.  No sensible person would place control of the election process in one party-any party-or in one branch-any branch- of the government, alone.  In some crucial states that was done.

Finally, to sustain this new kind of government, you would need to work on education.  You might build a system of centralized influence, if not control, over every classroom in the land.  You might require certification of the teachers with a bias toward the schools of education that train them in the approved way.  These schools, poor but obedient cousins of the elite universities, are always up on the latest methods of "delivery" of instruction (we do not call it teaching anymore).  Those new methods do not require much actual knowledge, which can be supplied from above.

As far as content, you might set up a system of textbook adoption that guarantees to publishers a massive and captive market but requires them to submit proposed books to committees of "experts", subject of course to political pressures.  You might build a standard approval curriculum on the assumption that everything changes-even history, even principles.  You might use this curriculum to lay the ground for building everything old, everything previously thought high and noble, in contempt.

Doing this, incidentally, deprives the student of the motive to learn anything out of fashion today.  It is a preparation not for a life of knowing and thinking, but for a life of compliance and conformity.

This is by no means an exhaustive account of what it would take to build a thoroughgoing tyranny-for further instruction, read Book Five of Aristotle's Politics or George Orwell's 1984.  But it gives an idea of a mighty system, a system that seems unassailable, a system combining the powers of education and communication.  Money and power in such a system would accrue to the same hands.  The people who would benefit from the system would be the ruling class.  Others would be frustrated.  And such a system would tend to get worse, because the exercise of unchecked power does not bring out the best in people.

Any elaborate system of government must have a justification, and the justification of this one cannot simply be that the ruling class are entitled on the basis of their superiority.  That argument went away with the divine right of kings.  No, for the current ruling class, the justification is science.  The claim of bureaucratical rule is a claim of expertise-of technical or scientific knowledge about everything.  Listen to Fauci on Face the nation, dismissing his critics in Congress as backward reactionaries.  When those critics disagree with him, Fauci said recently, "They're really criticizing science because I represent science.  That's dangerous".

The problem with this kind of thinking was pointed out by a young Winston Churchill in a letter to the writer H.G. Wells in 1901.  Churchill wrote:

Nothing would be more fatal than for the government of states to get into the hands of experts.  Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows only what hurts is a safer guide, than any vigorous direction of a specialized character.  Why should you assume that all except doctors, engineers, etc. are drones or worse?... If the ruler is to be an expert in anything he should be an expert in everything; and that is plainly impossible.

Churchill goes on to argue that practical judgment is the capacity necessary to making decisions.  And practical judgment, he writes in many places, is something that everyone is capable of to varying degrees.

Another thing about the experts is that they are not really engaged in the search for truth.  Instead, the powerful among them suppress the obvious fact that there is wide disagreement among the experts.  There always is.

God save us from falling completely into the hands of experts.  But God has given us the wherewithal to save ourselves from that.  So let us move to the second question posed above.

HOW TO DEFEAT A RISING DESPOTISM

In answering the second question, I will tell two stories that are suggestive.

The first took place in the small town of Jonesville, Michigan five miles north of Hillsdale College.  In our state, as in most places where the lockdowns were enforced, businesses were crippled or destroyed en masse.  Restaurants were chief among them.  One of our local restaurants is a 30-year-old diner called Spanglers Family Restaurant.  Mitch Spangler is the proprietor.  The business was founded by his late father, and Mitch was purchasing the business from his mother.  The payments to his mother depended upon the revenues of the business, and his mother's retirement depended upon the payments.  The life's work of two generations was at stake.  Mitch was also helping to support a daughter in college.

This is not to mention the more than 20 employees whose livelihoods are dependent on the Spanglers.  "Our employees are moms who have kids" Spangler told the local paper.  "One of our employees is pregnant; another is a 19-year-old kid.  This is his first job and he just bought a car".  Our leaders in Washington treat it as a small thing when trillions of dollars are being thrown about.  To the Spanglers and people like them, their relatively small revenue streams are everything.

Mr. Spangler was not prepared to surrender all this.  When a second lockdown was ordered by Michigan's governor a year ago last month, he kept his restaurant open.  He put a sign on the door and posted on Facebook to make clear, among other things, that he was acting out of necessity for the sake of his business and the livelihoods of all those dependent on it; that precautions would be taken, including the installation of an electrostatic fogger that would disinfect the air; that he understood the thinking of those who would choose to stay away from his restaurant; but that he hoped they would understand his own thinking.  "If you cannot support us, we understand", he wrote, "but please allow us to have the freedom to do what we have to do".

The wheels of bureaucracy began to grind.  Spanglers was visited repeatedly by the health department, by the licensing authorities, and even by the agriculture department (one wonders what they had to do with it).  Spangler was fined and threatened with forcible closure.  But he persisted, never backing down, and his business did well.  On a typical weekend, not only locals but supporters from the neighboring states of Ohio and Indiana lined up outside to show their support.

Mitch Spangler is our kind of fellow, and the Collage gave him some help organizing his legal representation.  We did not wish to be in the newspaper about this because we were facing our own pressures, and we too were determined to resist them.  But Spangler was no good at keeping a secret: he wore a Hillsdale Collage t-shirt on FOX News and thanked us for our help.  And when he had a little ceremony in his parking lot in the spring to thank his staff and customers, I was honored to say a few words.

This may not seem on its face a big story, but it is important because it is a story about the nature of human beings and of citizens and our rights.  The nature of a thing is the essence of a thing.  One aspect of the nature of a human being is that he must eat to live.  In condemnation of slavery, Abraham Lincoln loved to say that every man was created with a head, hands, and mouth, the implication being that the head should guide the hands in the feeding of the mouth.  Because we are made to live this way, we are also determined to live this way.  The alternative is dependence, which does not make us happy.

It should not therefore be surprising that, if you try to destroy the business of a man whose family has spent over 30 years building it, he will resist.  Trying to strongarm people like Mitch Spangler is not a good idea.  There are millions of them, and they have always made up the core of this greatest of free republics.

The second story is more famous, but it too is about nature-indeed, about the word's most basic meaning.  The word nature, as I said, refers to a thing's essence, but it comes from the Latin word for birth.  Our nature begins with how we are born and how we grow.  Just as we are attached by nature to the way we get our livings, so are we attached by nature, and still more to our children.  And this second story, set in Loudoun County, Virginia, is about parents and children.

In schools throughout Virginia, including Loudoun County, children are being subjected to critical race theory (CRT).  This involves lecturing children, especially those belonging to the non-preferred races, about the "structural evils" of which they are told they are a part.  Being taught alongside CRT is a distorted view of the history of our country, which true enough has its warts, but which surely has its glories as well-including glories about equal rights regardless of race.  Between fighting the armies of the English monarch, the Nazis, the Confederacy, the communists, and Islamic terrorists, something nearing a million Americans have died for the cause of equal rights.  These Americans have come in all colors.

Amidst statewide controversy over the teaching of CRT, the Loudoun County School Board also adopted abroad policy of recognizing "transgender" students in preference to their "biological sex" (excuse the redundancy).  Even before this, boys were permitted to use the girls' bathrooms, in one of which there was an assault and rape of a female student by a "gender fluid boy".  The boy in question was then allowed to attend another school in Loudoun County, where he assaulted another girl.  This first girl's parents were understandably outraged and, at the risk of being called narrow-minded, went so far as to complain to the school board.

Groups of parents who had already been protesting CRT and policies permitting transgenderism joined in the complaint.  There was no violence at the school board meeting with one exception: law enforcement was summoned, and the outraged father of the assaulted and raped girl was bloodied and dragged out of one meeting.  It is true, however, that voices were raised.

The National School Board Association called upon the Biden administration to investigate these protesting parents as potential perpetrators of "domestic terrorism or hate crimes".  Remember, these parents were citizens attending a meeting of an elected body to tell their representatives what they think.  The rights of petition and assembly are protected in the First Amendment.  Except for certain preferred groups, these rights today appear to have been repealed.

  1. S. Attorney General Merrick Garland intervened, instructing the FBI to investigate these parents and others around the country. The FBI's Counterterrorism Division has reportedly deployed tools and resources normally reserved for terrorist threats against parents who are angry at school boards for what is occurring in their children's schools. All this provoked massive support, across Virginia and around the nation, for the parents of Loudoun County.

This support is not surprising.  By nature, parents love their children and feel responsibility for them.  Citizens, especially one hopes American citizens, feel entitled to state their grievances.  The Declaration of Independence itself contains a list of grievances against the King.  The Biden administration reacted to these protests just as King George III reacted against the American colonists in the years leading up to the American Revolution: he called in law enforcement.  And the people of Virginia reacted in a way reminiscent of the American colonists: they defeated the candidate for governor who took the position that parents should have nothing to do with their children's education.

What do these two stories-one of them taking place in Hillsdale County, Michigan, a deep red county, and the other in Loudoun County, Virginia, which is deeply blue-have in common?  In both stories we see reactions against violations of our rights, rights that we have by nature as human beings.

The story about Mitch Spangler is about our right to work and to store up the product of our labor so that we and our families can eat and thrive.  The American Founders put this in terms of our natural right to property.  The story about the parents of Loudoun County is about the natural right of mothers and fathers to raise their children.  To interfere with these rights is to interfere with the natural rights of the human being.

These facts about nature were well known during the American Revolution, the very Revolution that is besmirched by the ruling class at the time of the Revolution.  It was the interference with the colonists' natural rights by the former ruling class that led to the American Revolution.  These recent stories from Michigan and Virginia show that we Americans do not seem to like that interference any better today.

In addition to the right to make a living and the right to raise our children, we have the right to participate in our government, even if we are not experts, and the right to look to the heavens and not to our ruling class for guidance.  We have these rights because we-every single one of us-were born with them sewn by God into our nature, and we cannot find our earthly fulfillment without them.

If we put these facts together as a people, we will have recovered the understanding that produced the American Revolution.  We will stop these current predations upon our rights.  We will bring this overwhelming government back where it belongs, under the control of the people.

The signs of such a movement are emerging.  Pray they are enough.

I submit this in the name of the Most Holy Trinity, in faith, with the responsibility given to me by Almighty God to honor His work and not let it die from neglect.

Bob Russell

Claremore, Oklahoma

June 28, 2022

 

 

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The Iron Law of Oligarchy Despotism

The Iron Law of Oligarchy

The Iron Law of Oligarchy works as follows:

First, there is always a rather small number of persons in the organization who actually make decisions, even if authority is vested in the body of the membership. This is a purely functional, if decisions are left to the “vulgar masses” then nothing get done. The decisions go on at great length without getting to the necessary issues, until either people leave or keep quiet.

Second, the bosses who have this delegated authority tend to take on more power than the members who selected them do. Once in power they tend to remain there for a long time and are not influenced by the opinions from below. Reasons for this is partly functional, but more so because of the way resources of power are distributed in an organization The leaders are a much smaller group than the body of the organization; therefore they have the advantage of being better organized. The members, as a whole, come together infrequently if at all; but the leadership is in constant contact with each other. The leadership tends to form a united, behind-the-scenes, informal group, this way making it much easier for them to make plans, carry out programs, etc.

Third, the leaders gradually develop values that are at odds with those of the members.That is to say that peoples outlooks are determined by their social positions. For the ordinary member, the organization is something he or she belongs to and participates in from time to time, but it is not usually the center of his or her life The leader's position is different; the organization is usually a full-time job, or at least a major part of their life. The leader becomes less interested in the concerns of the rank and file or the ideology of the group, and more concerned with staying in power.

Unlikely Action By Followers

Does this conflict, dare I say corruption, of the leaders bring them into conflict with their followers? Sometimes it does, but the leadership has the upper hand in such struggles. Unless the bulk of the membership is extremely upset about something, they are very unlikely to dispose of their despot.

Despotic Power of the Oligarchy

The power of the organization goes to those in control of the administrative resources. They control the communications within the organization: distribution of news, setting the meetings, it agendas, etc. Most importantly they have “legitimate power”, therefore, they can claim dissenters as "factions" and "splitters" who represent only themselves and their own interests, thereby making the factions the organization's enemies by creating internal dissension.

Who says organization, usually means oligarchy.

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Our Duty To The Declaration of Independence

More than just the birthday of our nation, the 4th of July commemorates something we as a country have all but forgotten. The 4th of July represents a celebration for it was, is, and always will be the only true philosophical revolution in all history. Distinctly American, ours was a revolution that changed the very concept of government.

On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed by our founding fathers as they denounced our separation and “absolved from all Allegiance to the British crown”. In doing so, the United States of America was created and with it a new concept emerged as a government under the people declared their freedom and independence.

This concept of government was uniquely American as it served as,”only a convenience created and managed by the people,with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people” stated Ronald Reagan.

The government we see today is no longer of mere convenience as Americans, more evident than ever before, relinquish their consent in acceptance of absolute despotism.

The long train of abuses and usurpations by the government have increased under the Obama adminstration to a point in which there “evinces a Design” to reduce us under “absolute despotism”.

The establishment of absolute tyranny appears to be surging into inevitability as the President sets a defiant tone in asserting that he will act “with or without congress“. In his 2014 State of the Union address, Barack Obama promised a “year of action” as he stated his intent to unilaterally act “wherever and whenever” he can without legislation.

Thus the President confirms his transformation into taking actions that are akin to a king.

John Locke wrote of this transformation under his Second Treatise of Government stating, “Whereas usurpation is the exercise of power to which someone else has a right, tyranny is the exercise of power to which nobody can have a right”.

Furthermore, “It is what happens when a governor, however entitled he is to govern, is guided not by the law but by his own wants, and his commands and actions are directed not to preserving his subjects’ properties but to satisfying his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion”.

Currently our President has shown nothing but sheer contempt for those who remain against his ideology. He is guided not by laws but by his own wants and commands directed at satisfying his own ambition to fundamentally transform the United States of America.

With Locke’s notion of tyranny in mind, one must only look towards the Declaration of Independence, specifically with an eye towards the founders description of the king, in comparing the similarities of Obama’s increasingly imperial presidency.

The Declaration states that the king, “has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his invasions on the Rights of people…He has erected a Multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people…He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good”.

The President has dissolved the “Representative Houses” in acting “with or without congress”, most notably in his multiple unilateral actions of delaying and implementing Obamacare. He has used the Government, particularly the IRS, to harass Tea Party groups, which continues to this day. He has refused acceptance of our laws, most recently in refusing to protect our borders as illegal immigrants swarm into the country without fear of deportation.

Feel free to Read the Rest of My Article By Clicking Here PoliticallyShort.com

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Recently President Obama waxed positively orgasmic over the “creation” of 443,000 “new jobs” in the economy. De-emphasized in his glowing report was the fact that 411,000 of these “new” jobs were temporary census positions and not real jobs at all. By the way the Census department has 560,000 odd employees and roughly a full 150,000 of them are permanent employees. Since the cost of running the census this year was $14+ Billion or roughly $10 Billion more than it cost to count everybody in 2000; and since those permanent employees must logically speaking not have much to do for 9.5 years of every ten within the census cycle . . . a whole lot of waste seems to be wrapped up in this particular government department, no?

Waste in government is pervasive and all of it kills jobs. In a similar way, common sense would rule against 90+% of all government spending programs and 88% of all new laws. Without term limits for congress, the evil done by career politicians and particularly progressive Republican and Democratic career politicos feeding at the public trough has become almost fatal to the country as a whole. Perhaps they should wait two days for every ten pages of a proposed new law and cuss and discuss it thoroughly . . . . so the 3,000 page Obamacare bill finally passed would require a minimum of, say, 21 months to get the bill right . . . or better yet, pass a realistic and helpful 150 page law over a period of one month. In any case, government spending annihilates jobs and destroys the private sector. Back to the Census . . . .

In fairness, this is nothing new, President Clinton made a huge deal about a bunch of very similar “new” jobs in 2000 precisely ten years earlier and presumably President George H. W. Bush did so also in 1990 and President Jimmy Carter likewise in 1980, etc., etc. This is, of course, a big lie and the jobs in question are, of course, false entities by any reasonable understanding . . . virtually as soon as they’re “created” they disappear from the economy. Let’s delve more deeply into this matter . . . .

Because of population growth, the American economy right now requires averaging 250,000 “new” jobs to be created every single month just so our official UNemployment rate can stay the same (coming out of college or high school every June etc. we add three million new job-seekers every year . . . as we’ve seen, it doesn’t seem to matter to the politicians whether or not the jobs in question can reasonably be considered REAL jobs or not. To the more reasonable among us, a.k.a. “taxpayers,” however, it makes a huge difference. REAL jobs are permanent and they help slightly offset all the government tax-spending jobs out there which are now being created hand over fist. For now, let that definition of a “REAL job” suffice. Let’s look at government jobs and their characteristics, what are the differences between government jobs and real jobs?

Government jobs tend to be . . .

1. Artificial concepts not precisely “necessary” in the big picture. Are, for example, government census workers and government people examining bee population shifts, and government people researching “human dating behavior” strictly needed? What great loss to society would occur if they didn’t exist? How much taxpayer money would be saved if these jobs were eliminated (or if census workers asked one-third the questions)?

2. Government jobs are UNproductive. No goods or services are added to the country as a result of their existence.

3. Government jobs tend to pay more, thus putting the potentially best and most productive people into Unproductive positions.

4. Government jobs tend to have the greatest benefits adding to the overall cost and since their retirement benefits are among the greatest, that payment goes on sucking away at the country’s lifeblood long after these workers retire.

5. Government jobs tend to have the most substantial perquisites (perks). It isn’t just the President whose actual job cost cannot be calculated, but virtually all the upper echelon government employees whose perks bleed the rest of us dry.

6. Government jobs are destroyers of REAL jobs in the REAL economy. Spain was the poster-child for the European Union about a decade back with a booming economy and only 3% unemployment. Then they adopted a “green-jobs” policy. Today Spain’s unemployment is just over 20%. President Obama threatened us with the creation of five million green jobs. Since the $675,000 subsidization cost of each Spanish green job cost 2.2 jobs in the real Spanish economy, we could expect losing eleven million real jobs?

7. Jobs that create a whole artificial group (the “political class”) within our society which seeks to perpetuate itself and enlarge itself and its budgets at all costs. The “imperatives” of this new “special interest group” seem to be contrary to the interests and needs of mainstream Americans.

8. Jobs whose creation is aligned with bigger, more onerous government, more red tape and more likelihood of finding a “boot on our neck.”

9. Jobs which tend to be temporary such as the census workers’ situation. In the recent Spanish studies of their economic collapse. It was revealed that only one in ten of the green jobs they created actually lasted much beyond the original funding period. In terms of Mr. Obama’s proposal to create five million new green-tech jobs, that means that he’d only be creating 500,000 permanent jobs (at a cost of eleven million real permanent jobs, remember).

10. Jobs for which the real cost is never shown, or even ever known. How much does it cost to have a President of the United States? Obvious things like salary, upkeep of the White House and paying for the White House staff, security, Air Force One, Camp David, travel and entertaining foreign dignitaries and an extensive communications grid in place pale before the perks of the office. Look at the inaugurations, the presidential balls, bringing in of entertainers like Paul McCartney, etc, how much does it cost to have a president of the United States. Rajjpuut estimates this one employee costs us DIRECTLY at least $1 Billion. The indirect cost of Mr. Obama, personally is, of course, potentially in the hundreds of TRillions of dollars and that’s just the money cost . . . . How much does it cost to have an Environmental Protection Agency that puts 40% of some central California workers out of a job by insisting that a two-inch fish was endangered by irrigation pumps to water the vegetable basket of the nation?

11. Sometimes a job whose existence is onerous and an abomination to much of the rest of the country: IRS agents come to mind.

12. Political, often, by their very nature rather than neutral. Jobs aligned with OSHA and the EPA, for example tend to be created by liberals. Defense contracts tend to be created by actions from conservatives.

13. A situation where not only Unproductive but often actually slipshod work is done. Look at our present Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Laws were put in place in 1990 and 1994 to protect our safety. The Bush and Obama administration “signed off” on many of these safety requirements for British Petroleum (such as the need for ten fire booms on site – there were ZERO fire booms present when the explosion occurred). Indeed, the governmental regulation agency MMS was prepared to give BP its highest safety award five or six days after the explosion occurred – that notion is now on hold, and no award has been granted. One of the biggest series of pathetic and scary jokes is the notion of “Close enough for government work.”

14. Often a job where ethical considerations are routinely NOT even considered. During the Bush administration, a governmental oversight group found out that oil companies were routinely wining, dining, having sex with, and providing drugs for the governmental employees charged with oversight for the oil industry. NICE.

15. Despite the “merit system,” of exams, etc. created for civil servants a job given to political friends more often than not. Of all the stimulus funds thus far over 68% has been spent in areas that voted disproportionately for Obama over Mc Cain in 2008. Even though many more actual counties either voted for Mc Cain or slightly-favored Obama , only 31% of the total stimulus funds went there.

16. Despite the so-called merit system, a job given to certain preferred portions of society over the rest of society. Affirmative action in government hiring has been an abysmal failure. The Sotomayor fire-fighter case highlighted some of the obvious discrepancies.

17. Often a job that works at cross-purposes to the rest of society. Rajjpuut recently found himself with a suspended driver’s license courtesy of a ridiculous clerical error when a paid speeding ticket dropped through the cracks in the system. When asked how to get the matter straightened out . . . ‘you’ll have to wait 30 days that’s the requirement, can’t get around it,” no way to correct their mistake . . . . So many of burdensome errors and deliberate red tape and obstruction and waste of time in society is attributable to government officiousness. OSHA and the IRS and EPA cost of tens of billions of dollars every year. Teachers across the nation (hired by the school districts but loyal only to their union) are now teaching that the Founding Fathers were tyrants and racists and otherwise no goodniks while praising labor unions and socialism in their classes. In Los Angeles the lie that the two Arizona immigration laws are racist has been ordered taught in civics classes. One L.A. history making a "field trip" to Arizona to protest the Arizona immigration law before travelling posed before a mural in their school with Castro, Che Guevarra, Uncle Ho and Lenin. Three other L.A. social studies teachers are overtly and directly emphasizing to Hispanic students (at least 40% of them illegals) the need for a Revolution within the United States to give back lands lost by Mexico in 1946's Mexican-American War . . . . which government are these govt. employees working for?

18. Many government jobs are “make-work” creations designed to expand the empire of some muckety-muck bureaucrat. Promotions routinely come (all out of proportion to actual “production”) to those in government who command the most money . . . which usually means those who command the most subordinates. Expand the “scope” of your office (usually unnecessarily and unwisely) and get promoted to a higher position where you, of course, want to expand again. Activity is easily confused for results in government . . . .

19. Without exception, governmental regulatory jobs are absolutely dominated by the industries they supposedly oversee – remember our example of the (literally) in bed together relationship between the big oil companies and MMS. For another example, at the managerial and supervisory levels, the FDA is virtually, the best job in the world for ex-bigwig pharmaceutical workers to consider. The ethics, or lack thereof, of this incestuous relationship literally kills many Americans every year. What is the number three cause of deaths and number five cause of hospital visits in the country? Huge numbers of "iatrogenic" deaths and injuries from legally prescribed medicines result every year from FDA incompetence. The ADA and its oversight of the food industry is presumably even less compent than the FDA now, over a century since Sinclair Lewis wrote his blockbuster novel, "The Jungle" exposing corruption and uncleanliness in the American food industry.

20. Require “emergency” spending virtually every year. To “justify their budgets, government agencies routinely find themselves spending money willy-nilly so that next year’s budget can be as large or larger.

21. Is often a necessary job, which when done rightly puts the job occupant out of work. This happens when a war is won, for example. But most of the time on the rare occasion when a government job has solved the problem it was created to end, the job is somehow made a permanent drain upon society. In fact, it’s often a job whose self-perpetuation is an actual danger to the country. Most people do not know that originally, the U.S. congress met every other year for 140 days only. Texas in its wisdom has a similar part-time legislature even today. The cost to the nation of a permanent legislature is incalculable, bad laws clearly outnumber good ones by about a 12/1 ratio. Then there’s the pork and other corruptions that occur because of the need to get re-elected of the incumbent rascals that have already hurt us . . . etc., etc., ad nauseum.

22. A government job is quite often a position whose day-to-day operating standards and procedures defy all logic. Families or small businesses who operated using the same guidelines that government routinely follows would be quickly ruined. Big businesses could survive a bit longer but who can operate successfully a) without a budget such as our present Congress is now doing even though a budget is required by law b) continually spending much more than you have c) creating set-asides such as Social Security, Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid and then never actually setting the money required by law aside so that now besides our almost $14 TRillion national debt we also have almost $110 TRillion in UNfunded obligations d) Not honoring simple common-sense, for example the new "Pay-Go" law was a good idea. It said no new spending could occur without either the generation of a new tax or the cutting in costs from elsewhere in the federal budget to pay for the proposed new project. How often has Pay-Go been followed since it was created in February? NEVER! The rascals simply call everything an "emergency" and then forget about Pay-Go.

23. When it comes to progressive job creation, there seems to an "ivory tower" approach consistently in evidence. Let's talk about the Gulf oil spill again. Rabid environmentalism stopped much of the inland drilling and pumping and all the near shore drilling and pumping. The facts are that BP screwed up monumentally; governmental regulators -- whose responsibility it was to keep BP operating safely -- screwed up monumentally; and environmentalists who pushed for exactly the deep offshore drilling we now are faced with when we didn't really have the completely safe technology to do it are also deeply at fault. Another example: in 1972, worldwide deaths from malaria amounted to fewer than 50,000. However, since the U.N. and the United States outlawed DDT, fifty million people have died around the world due to pseudo-science claims that DDT was harmful to non-insect life never proved. The president's aim to create five million green-tech@@ jobs is likewise based upon the pseudo-science of global warming^^ and is presuming that "saying it's so makes it so." If President Grant had said that we were going to create 800,000 new electric jobs in 1870 . . . his saying it's possible is NOT equivalent in reality to it being possible. 800,000 American jobs in electricity didn't come to be until about 1922 over half a century later. How many real jobs would have been lost over those fifty years if Grant and his successors had followed such an ignorant path? What would have been the economic and overall history of the country? Promising the unachievable has grown into a virtually criminal political art.

Here, in a very brief essay, is much that people need to know about how economics actually works in modern life . . . .

http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

Liberals and Progressives do not know nor appreciate that little essay, they believe that the creative problem-solving part of human nature is actually benefitted by big government. The sad pattern is that liberals and progressives do not have even the slightest understanding of economics and therefore proselytize a utopian picture totally out of contact with the demands and conditions of the REAL world. Survival and "thrival" in the Real world is based upon surplus goods, a.k.a. profits. Liberals and progressives have a real yen for criticizing profits and business at every turn. Not realizing that prosperity means surplus, and "obscene profits," Liberals condemn the very lifeblood of modern society. REAL jobs are created by four possible motivations:

a. survival problems

b. profit/surplus problems

c. combinations of a and b

d. innovation and entreprenuerial expression

Taking things back to "basics" two million years ago . . . virtually everything that was done by humanoids other than children's play and sex during pregnancy was a necessary "job" for the individual and group's survival. In particular, the need for nomad hunter-gatherers to find adequate shelter; protect themselves from large carnivorous animals; and most importantly to secure adequate food and water was often an hour-to-hour imperative. Their eonomic system was absolutely 100% communistic.

Shortly after the coming of CroMagnon man roughly 35,000 years ago, earlier patterns of nomadic hunting became culturally locked in and tied to technological innovations (like taming of the dog; making of spear-chuckers, bows and arrows, spears and hand tools, domestic tools, tents, clothing, sewing tools, water bladders, leather bags, and later even baskets) and for the first time ever . . . occasional surpluses were possible. The necessity of constant travel made it impossible to carry much in the way of surplus clothing, tools, weapons, etc. -- even heavy tents were a huge problem . . . but food and water surpluses were absolutely necessary for Cro-Magnon's. Virtually every culture gathered vine-dried fruits equivalent to raisins and learned to dry meat. A well-known example, during the late Cro-Magnon years, the American Indians' pemmican was one of the greatest such innovations: a fat-dense**, calorie-rich, nutritious, easily carried food surplus. Virtually every family had their own "spiced-up" pemmican recipes passed down from mother to daughter. Because each family was largely responsible for its own survival and creation of surpluses a cross between communism and light "capitalism" say 98% communistic. (We exaggerate some in calling any part of this system "capitalistic" because until the adaptation of money in many cultures roughly 7,000 years ago, very little "specialization of labor " beyond gender and age specialization which had been going on for almost two million years actually existed.) Again, we're talking 98% communistic or socialistic society.

When natural "Edens," such as in coastal situations in the Mediterranean and California and Egypt, existed greater surpluses were possible and less travelling was necessary. Soon rudimentary agriculture became possible and domestication of the horse, goat, sheep, cattle and semi-domestication of the cat (feral cats loved "amber waves of grain" and the mice, rats and other rodents that fed upon the crops) provided the possibility of "permanent villages" existing. And what exactly made this all possible? SURPLUS a.k.a. PROFIT. Specialized labor like carpentry, pottery, basket-weaving, farming, fishing, metalworking and even soldiering first appeared during this era in these Edens. No longer was it necessary for the full range of hunter-gatherer skills to be practiced by virtually every single member of the tribe. At first a strictly barter economy existed but soon money was created. After the initial idea of surplus (storing up some of the excess food against "rainy days" which operated over two million years to ensure mankind's survival and advancement) money was the greatest single innovation for mankind's survival and advancement of all. Money was, in effect, nothing less than "stored surplus work." While this might sound to most of us today like pretty much a 100% capitalistic society . . . reality was considerably different since forcible tax collection (of grain and goods and coin) by tyrannical rulers was pretty much the order of the day. Later as "nobility by direct bloodline from God" became a normal part of the ruling class's rationale for existence, various sorts of feudal-type arrangements became the norm in virtually every "civilized country" or duchy in the world with a trifling few short-lived Republics thrown in among all the ordinary despotic states and semi-benevolent monarchies.

The economic system known as capitalism was found almost purely among guild-craftsman and folks like independent black smiths and cottage industries like weaving particularly in England and until about 1750 that's the way it was. The "most capitalistic" country in the world with its merchants, craftsman, cottage industries and independent farmers was perhaps 40% capitalistic. The feudal system with all the British lords and ladies was still deeply tied into the overall economic picture. Then came James Watt and the Industrial Revolution. Although the Luddites (cottage weavers put out of work by the water and steam power looms and other textile innovations) rebelled, the benefits to all British society of cheap cloth was among the most shocking and positive things that had ever happened in all of history.

Without the expansion of nobility into the American colonies, rugged individualism prevailed and this nation quickly became the most capitalistic society the Earth has ever seen, perhaps 99.7% so in 1787. The last burst of capitalism released upon America occurred during the Reagan years 1981-1989 when 21 million jobs were created. However, because Republican Reagan was faced with Democratic control of the House and Senate and needed to compromise with Dems to pass his own pet projects . . . the National Debt skyrocketed.

The single-most Capitalistic period in American history was the Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge era sandwiched between progressive presidents Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover. The "Unknown Depression" of 1921-22 was met steadfastly by Harding and Coolidge (after Harding's Death) by cutting taxes 50% and spending 49%. The Roaring Twenties that ensued was the single most transformational decade in history as the Unknown Depression ended in late 1922. Little known by most people is that Democratic progressive Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran constantly and was elected for promising he would return to the Harding-Coolidge tax-reduction and spending- reduction paradigm as he succeeded progressive Republican Hoover. He obviously lied and did the opposite and America suffered under a dozen-year Great Depression extended by his socialistic efforts while the rest of the world had a fairly short "little 'd' depression." Ultimately, the facts of economic life are this: as in so many other ways, when it comes to jobs and the economy: "that government is best which governs least."

Ya'all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

** should you ever find yourself in an extended survival situation, it isn't only getting enough calories and traditional nutrients that matters, you could actually get 3,500 calories a day and die malnourished if you can't supply the body's need for fat from the ultra-lean rabbits, fish and birds you're most likely to catch.

@@the Spanish green-tech economic debacle is clearly pertinent

^^ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936289.ece
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