Amazing new innovation in light bulbs! Tired of light bulbs that take several minutes to “warm up” and become bright? Tired of having to follow special disposal rules? Tired of having to evacuate your house and call a haz-mat team every time one of your light bulbs breaks? And what about all that money you spend on those bulbs? Well guess what? A new light bulb has been invented that turns on instantly! That’s right, there’s no wait for full brightness, no bumping around in the half-lit darkness of your kitchen, the light is 100% illuminated in less than a second! Disposal is easy! Just throw it in the trash, no worries! And if your lamp falls over and the light bulb breaks, there’s no need to send the kids outside and pay several hundred dollars for a haz-mat crew to come clean it up, just vacuum or sweep up the broken pieces, throw it all in the trash, and you’re done! Yes, there is a trade-off. These new light bulbs are slightly less energy efficient and may burn out faster, but guess what, they’re so cheap you could buy 20 of these bulbs for the price of one of your conventional fluorescent bulbs!

Don’t get me wrong. I love the idea of a light bulb that uses less energy and last longer. Not because I think I’ll save the planet by using them, but because I’d love to have a lower electricity bill, and I don’t like changing light bulbs. But our government knows what you know, which is that having a lower electricity bill and not having to change bulbs as frequently is not enough of an incentive to make you overlook the downside of the danger fluorescent bulbs pose to your family and the environment and their much higher cost. But since the government knows what is best for you better than you do, they’re going to force you to use fluorescent bulbs. Thanks, government!

Oh, and ignore all the money GE puts into lobbying our federal government, the money GE donates to political causes, and the fact that GE owns NBC which pushes “green” technology in its programming. This is all just GE trying to help out. Nevermind that GE will make billions as a result of the government outlawing incandescent lighting and Obama’s “green jobs” push. That has nothing to do with any of this.

There are a lot of people in this country who have been on personal spending binges that mimic what our government has been doing. Typically these binges are funded by credit cards, since people without credit cards either don’t have the funds, or if they do, they’re generally smart enough not to blow all their cash. The pathway to personal financial enlightenment goes something like this:

1. Get your first credit card. “Are you kidding me?! I can go spend $10,000 right now?! Yee-ah, I’m getting me a motorcycle!”

2. Get your second credit card. “Flat screen TV, whoo-hoo!”

3. Get married. “Now there are two of us with credit cards–we can buy twice as much stuff!”

4. No new credit cards. “Dang, we can’t spend any more? Well, at least we’ve got all this cool stuff and all we have to make are these minimum payments every month. No problem.”

5. Things start to get tight. “What do you mean we don’t have enough money to cover the monthly expenses? I don’t understand what you’re saying. What do the words ‘we don’t have enough money’ mean?”

6. Reality starts to set in. “Oh man, we’re in it deep…”

7. Garage sale. “Ok, we’ll just sell everything and pay off the credit cards, and we’ll be smarter next time…we’ll only use the credit cards for things we really need.”

8. Temporary respite. “Whew, I’m glad we got rid of most of those credit cards.”

9. More credit cards. “Hey! Visa upped our credit limit and Amex sent us a new card with no credit limit!”

10. Needs. “Yeah, I know I said we’d only use credit cards for things we need, but we really need a new BBQ cause my family is coming into town.”

11. Things get tight, again. “What do you mean we’ve maxed all our cards out again? I thought Amex didn’t have a limit?!”

12. Reality, part two. “Oh geez, we can’t even pay these minimum payments…not to mention the rent!”

13. Craigslist. “I can’t believe we couldn’t even pay off a single card after selling all that stuff…those people on craigslist are total cheapskates.”

14. Real reality. “We’re stuck. We can’t make the minimum payments, and we’ve sold almost everything we own.”

15 Despair. “Oh my gosh, this is horrible. I couldn’t buy my sister a birthday present this year. What’s worse, bankruptcy or dying? No, I’m not suicidal honey, I just want to consider all my options with an open mind. Wait, they don’t pay out life insurance if I commit suicide? Well, forget that, I guess. Oh, we don’t have life insurance anyway? Darn.”

16. A mighty change of heart. “Ok, we’re idiots. Let’s just admit it. We don’t know a thing about managing our finances, and now we’re totally hosed. I wish I didn’t know what a credit card was. Seriously, I swear if I get another offer for a new card it’s going straight in the trash. Yeah, I know I’ve said that before, but I mean it this time.”

17. Commitment. “No, Visa, I don’t want another card so I can transfer my balances to it. If you give me another card, I’ll just end up in even worse shape a year down the road. Just stop giving me credit cards! I never want to see another credit card!”

18. Hope. “I was just listening to this guy on the radio, Dave Ramsey, and he can totally get us out of this! We just have to sell the house, our cars, cancel the vacation, rent a shack, and take second jobs, but I brushed up on my 3rd grade math skills and if we follow his plan, we can pay off all this debt in about two years…and the best part is if we avoid the credit cards and only buy stuff when we have the cash, I think we could have everything back that we used to have in four or five years, and we won’t have had to charge anything on credit cards, we’ll actually own the stuff! What, you don’t know what the word ‘own’ means? It’s when you have something, but you don’t have to make the minimum payment on a credit card every month for it. It’s awesome! Yeah, I know, it almost sounds dishonest somehow…but it totally works because we save the money up for the stuff before we buy it! Totally weird, but I’m pretty sure it works.”

19. Work. “Man, this hard, I hate delivering pizzas. It seems like I’ll never dig out of this hole.”

20. Debt-free. “Freeeedommm!”

And hopefully they never get another credit card and they live happily ever after. If this young couple were our country, at what stage of financial enlightenment would our country be? I’d say a lot of people are at #5, and a growing number are moving on to #6. That leaves a lot of steps before #20, when the country pays off all its debts and never resorts to debt going forward. Can we do it? Sure. Would it be wonderful? More than we can imagine. But the toughest part will be getting the general public on board…yeah, I know, you might think the toughest part would be to get politicians on board, but let’s man up and admit that our politicians are there at our mercy, and if we have bad politicians it’s mostly our own fault for electing them. If the people get it, the politicians will either get it, or they’ll get voted out and replaced with politicians who do.

The key to getting to the 20th step is education of the general public. First, to the true reality of the problem (it’s real, it’s bad, and it’s not going to get better on its own). Second, to the short-term solution (cut spending by HUGE amounts–we’re talking about a 95% reduction in government spending over the next 10 years and putting all the extra into paying off debt, and abolish the Federal Reserve, which would be the equivalent of cutting up your credit cards and closing your accounts). Third, we must be educated regarding a long-term solution (Constitutional amendments putting limits on the federal government so that it is not allowed to finance anything with debt other than declared war, allowing the government to only spend in any year as much as was collected during the previous year, and outlawing federal income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, corporate taxes, etc.).

The reason this would all be so difficult is that it would require sacrifice. It would require people to say “No” when the government offers them money, and that’s hard to do, especially when you feel like you deserve anything the government offers you after it has taken so much from you. And many of us would see our standard of living decline, at least temporarily. When you’re spending money on credit cards, you’re standard of living is high. When you stop using credit cards, your standard of living goes down. When you start paying off the credit cards it goes down even more. It is only after you have paid off the credit cards and have saved for a while that your standard of living can return to where it was. This can create the illusion of things being good when they’re really bad, and bad while you’re fixing the problem, even though when you’re fixing the problem you’re in an infinitely better position than when you were maxing out the cards. If the government were to cut off all sorts of services and discontinue spending, people would say “Everything is going to hell!” In reality, it already went there, and it would be on its way to getting out of there, but there would be a temporary delay between the action of fixing the problem and feeling like things were getting better.

The good news is that if we choose to fix the problem, we’ll be much better off. The downturn would be bad, but it would be temporary. A few years, and we’d be well back on the road to recovery. The alternative is that things will slowly get worse and worse, and they will finally get so bad that it might take decades to recover, and the country might become unstable and vulnerable. I hope we choose to fix the problem, rather than wait for the repo man to come take all our stuff and the sheriff to evict us.

Our founders saw that power, concentrated in a central authority (like a king) led to tyranny. They knew they didn’t want that. They also saw that power, given 100% to the people, was anarchy, and that when people got tired of anarchy, they turned to a “strong hand” to restore order, and that generally meant a dictator/king/tyrant, etc. Both extremes led to the same outcome. The object of the creation of the United States was to find the proper balance between “power to the people” and a central authority.

But what we have today is like what our founders envisioned only in part. Where things have gotten out of whack is with the amount of power held by the central authority, that is, the federal government, rather than the states. The founders did not intend for the federal government to be powerless, but they never intended it to be as powerful as it is today relative to the states. They wanted to keep as much power as close to the people as possible, and only give as much power to the federal government as was absolutely necessary for it to carry out the purposes they envisioned for it (as spelled out in the Constitution). The country got off to a shaky start, and there have been some major problems along the way, and of course there are individual exceptions, but it’s hard to make the case that overall things haven’t worked out pretty well.

But things are not as good as they could be, and there is a more and more realistic possibility they will get much worse. Much of the problem stems from the imbalance of power between the federal government and the states. The problem areas are simple to identify, they are; 1) money, and 2) laws and regulations. That is, most government spending should be made at the state level, but it is not. The federal budget is much, much larger than the combined budgets of the states. And there are far to many laws made at a federal level in areas that should be left up to the states. A good case study is our educational system. Money leaves the states in the form of taxes, goes the federal government, and then the federal government gives money back to the states for education. Why does the money need to leave the states in the first place? Why doesn’t the federal government leave education 100% up to the states to manage? This would remove the divisive topic from Washington and restrict it to each state can work it out, so that the people can decide what kind of system they want. This would create the kind of experimentation the founders envisioned, in which each state had the opportunity to try things out and see what worked, and in theory the states would learn from one another. This has been credibly demonstrated by Massachusetts experimenting with universal health care without the consequences needing to be inflicted on the other 49 states. If each state had total freedom to educate its students without interference from the federal government, how much faster would we arrive at the best methods of education?

The problem is not Obama. It’s not George Bush. It’s not Democrats, and it’s not Republicans. The problem is anyone who transfers power from the states to the federal government, whether intentionally or unintentionally. What I want to see in a presidential candidate is someone whose primary purpose, after national defense, will be to return power to the states. How will we know if he/she is doing their job? Because the number of laws will shrink, and the national budget will shrink. I’d like to see a reduction in the federal budget to somewhere in the range of 1-5% of what it is currently. If someone could make the credible case for doing this, that would be someone I could get excited about supporting. This, to me, is the most important presidential quality, the tearing down of federal power and returning it to the people, that is, the states, rather than building it up in Washington at the expense of the states.

I welcome your criticism of any books on this list, since it is not my desire to push any viewpoint that is untrue, but only those rooted in fact. And of course, feel free to recommend any books you think should be added to the list.

Must-Reads. These are books I believe are critical for a US President to have read. I have no reason to question the content of the books on any substantial level, and I do not believe the content of these books will become outdated anytime in the next 10 years.

• If not specifically listed below, I believe every US President should have read at least one biography of every US President to precede them, especially of those Presidents who presided over wars or other crises.
• If not specifically listed below, every US President should have read just about anything written by any of the Founding Fathers.

• John Adams, David McCullough
• 1984, George Orwell – If you’re not consciously working to move the country away from this type of society, how do you know you’re not working us towards it?
• Animal Farm, George Orwell – Beware of power and those who say they want it to do good.
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley – What is the purpose of human life?
• The Reagan Diaries, Ronald Reagan
• The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
• Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
• 1776, David McCullough
• Left to Tell, Immaculee Ilibagiza
• The Innovator’s Prescription, Clayton Christensen – If there’s one book that can tell us how to reform health care, this is it.
• The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen
• The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen
• Leadership and Self-Deception, The Arbinger Group
• Parenting with Love and Logic, Foster W. Cline – The more our country becomes a nanny-state, the more important this book becomes.
• Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls, Noel M. Tichy
• Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, Larry Bossidy
• The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith – I don’t necessarily recommend it for reading (it’s extremely tedious reading) but any President should know what’s in it and understand the content.
• The Bible
• The Qur’an
• Good to Great, Jim Collins
• Enough, Juan Williams – Solutions for helping all racial minorities.
• Free to Choose, Milton Friedman
• The Federalist Papers
• Common Sense, Thomas Paine
• The FairTax Book, John Linder, Neal Boortz – I’m not saying I’m convinced the FairTax is the way to go, but I think it bears serious consideration, as do other ideas for tax reform.
• FairTax: the Truth, Neal Boortz – Ditto.
• The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes
• Mornings on Horseback, David McCullough
• Truman, David McCullough
• The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
• Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler
• The Road to Serfdom, FA Hayek
• Lord of the Flies, William Golding
• The 4-Hour work Week, Timothy Ferris
• Fahrenheit 451,Ray Bradbury

Conditional Must-Reads. These are books which, at face value, I would say are must-reads, except for various reasons. One is that I may have some questions as to their credibility. This may be due to questions I have about the authors’ backgrounds or facts in the books themselves. If they had been substantially discredited they wouldn’t be here at all, so I’m not saying they won’t make it to the must-read list someday, but for the moment I don’t feel I can put them on the same level as the must-read list. I may also place books here if they are one of many books to cover a particular topic, and having not yet read all of them, I am at a loss to declare which book(s) may be the best to be on the must-read list. For example, there are many biographies of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, but I have not read enough of them to say which one(s) I would recommend.

• A. Lincoln, a Biography, Ronald C. White, Jr.
• The Indispensable Man, James Thomas Flexner
• The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes
• America Alone, Mark Steyn
• The 5,000 Year Leap, Cleon Skousen
• Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg
• President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination, Richard Reeves
• Freakonomics, Steven D Levitt, Stephen J Dubner
• SuperFreakonomics, Steven D Levitt, Stephen J Dubner

Helpful, if you’ve got the time. Future presidents are probably busy people, and therefore can’t read everything out there that might be helpful to them. Here are some books I believe would be helpful, but not critical, to a future US President.

• The Path Between the Seas, David McCullough
• Liberty and Tyranny, Mark Levin
• Undaunted Courage, Stephen E. Ambrose
• The Great Bridge, David McCullough
• Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick
• The Five Temptations of a CEO, Patrick M. Lencioni
• A Clockwork Orange, A. Burgess

Interesting, but… These books have something of value in them, even if they contain known errors, or may be outdated within a few short years. These books stand a good chance of being removed from the list.

• Nothing yet.

Potential. These are kept from anywhere else on the list only because I haven’t read them yet and do not have any basis for judgment, other than to say I think they could potentially make the list.

• Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Michael B. Oren
• Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present, Michael Oren
• The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, Gordon S. Wood
• The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History, Gordon S. Wood
• The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood
• Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, Gordon S. Wood
• The United States: The Early Republic, Gordon S. Wood
• American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic, Joseph J. Ellis
• American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, Joseph J. Ellis
• Founding Brothers The Revolutionary Generation, Joseph J Ellis
• From Beirut to Jerusalem,Thomas L. Friedman
• What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis
• The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, Bernard W. Lewis
• The Middle East, Bernard Lewis
• The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945, Lucy S. Dawidowicz
• The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Robert Conquest
• The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Robert Conquest
• Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum
• Memoirs of the Second World War, Winston S. Churchill
• A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, Andrew Roberts
• EXODUS, Leon Uris
• The Haj, Leon Uris
• Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, William L. Shirer
• The Keys to a Successful Presidency, Alvin Felzenberg
• ConUNdrum: The Limits of the United Nations and the Search for Alternatives, Brett D. Schaefer
• Flat Tax Revolution: Using a Postcard to Abolish the IRS, Steve Forbes
• The FairTax Fantasy, Hugh Hewitt
• The Flat Tax: Why It Won’t Work for America, Scott E. Hicko
• How The Mighty Fall, Jim Collins
• Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief, James M. McPherson
• Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman
• Come On People, Bill Cosby
• Economic Facts and Fallacies, Thomas Sowell
• The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom
• The Republic, Plato
• A World Lit Only by Fire, William Manchester
• Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen

Milbank claims Beck’s method for success is simple, “He goes places where others are forbidden by conscience.” Or in other words, other conservative talk show hosts have standards, scruples, integrity, shame, etc., but Beck isn’t constrained by such things. Beck says whatever he wants to say for the sake of ratings and nothing else. As evidence, he brings up Beck’s mentions of “Death panels? Government health insurance for dogs? FEMA concentration camps? An Obama ‘civilian national security force’ like Hitler’s SS or Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard? An administration official advocating forced abortions and sterilization agents in drinking water?”

In other words, Milbank is implying there is no credible evidence for government-run health care death panels or any of the other items in that list. Anyone who seriously brings up these items as criticism for our government does not have a conscience, or is defying it.

But Dana, there is evidence for death panels. Obama himself gave evidence of his support for the rationing of care that would be the domain of “death panels” in his famous “take the pill” statement. Whenever a government bureaucrat makes decisions in situations that affect the life and death of a patient, rather than leaving that up to the patient and doctor to decide, then you’ve got a death panel. You might argue that it’s the same when a life insurance tells grandma to take the pill instead of getting a pace-maker, but no, it isn’t, because when the government becomes involved, there will only be one choice. The current system, with its problems, at least gives me some options, however limited and expensive they may already be due to government regulations.

As for the other items in the list, they aren’t necessarily made up, or the domain of crazy, half-brained conspiracy theorists, except for the FEMA concentration camp item, which Beck actually debunked. And just because Glenn asks a question, doesn’t mean he’s making a claim. He’s trying to figure out what’s true and what isn’t, and if something gets traction and can’t be dismissed out of hand, then he’ll do the research until he figures out what’s going on.

But the ultimate insults Milbank brings to bear, which has become the popular thing to accuse Beck of over the past year or two, is that “There’s scant evidence that Beck holds his zany views with any conviction…” That is, he doesn’t believe what he’s saying, he just says it because it works. How ironic for the left to accuse Beck of such a thing, when it is the left that engages in exactly this behavior. A case of projection, perhaps? We don’t have to look any further than Obama’s campaign statements of 2008 and compare them to his actions in 2009 to see that there are those on the left who are willing to say anything to get elected, even if it’s the opposite of what they intend to do once in office. On the other hand, what evidence does Milbank have that Beck doesn’t believe what he says? Well, to borrow Milbank’s term, it’s “scant”. Apparently so are Milbank’s journalistic qualifications.

This got me thinking about Rush’s succession plan. Who takes over for Rush when he dies, and how will the transition occur? What will happen to those invaluable three hours of radio air-time, coveted by every other conservative radio talk show host out there? Could it be that Rush has anointed a successor? When Rush assumes room temperature will Hannity be #1 and Beck #2, or will Rush’s will reveal that Beck is to be given his time slot, catapulting Beck to #1 status overnight and rendering his tagline “The number three most listened to talk show in America” obsolete?

Of course I don’t know, but I suspect Rush has no plan, per se. He doesn’t need one, and it doesn’t fit what he preaches. Succession plans are for controlled organizations, but conservative talk radio, despite the claims of the left, is not controlled by the GOP, oil companies, or Wall Street. It is an ad hoc assemblage of those voted by listeners (by their choice of who to listen to) to be the most qualified for the job. Who will take over for Rush when Rush leaves this world behind? It will be whoever can make the most money in his place, and it is only fitting that it should be so. It will be the free market system that Rush has championed that will decide, in its own sort of orderly way, who will succeed him. There will be no committee to decide, nor a king, dictator, czar, or director. There will only be the votes of Rush’s listeners, and the dollars they spend on the products he endorses and promotes. Rush doesn’t have to worry about the matter in the least. He doesn’t have to choose someone, and then worry about having chosen the wrong person, and realize on his deathbed that he needs to rewrite his will to choose someone else. He can die in peace, knowing that he has created an industry, and that Hannity, Beck, a relative unknown, or perhaps someone who has not even begun his career yet, will take over for him, and whoever it is, it will be the right choice, the perfect choice, and I suspect it will be Rush’s choice as well.

As for those who will trumpet the end of conservative talk radio with Rush’s death, I think they’ll be in for a bit of a shock in the years that follow.

I recently finished reading the big government/mind control trio of 1984, A Clockwork Orange, and Brave New World. I had heard about these books all my life, but somehow never read them before this month. Earlier in life I had read Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451, and in reviewing the first three I feel it’s important to include those two as well, because they all focus on the same themes, which is control. You might throw Ayn Rand’s Anthem in there as well.

It’s an age-old problem. If you let people be free, then they do things that are unpleasant, to say the least. And so from the dawn of time, leaders, dictators, governments, etc. have tried to figure out the best ways to build a society in which the greatest percentage of the populace could have the “good things” of life. These methods can generally be divided into three camps; 1) total control (authoritarianism, totalitarianism, tyranny, etc.), 2) no control (anarchy), and 3) some mixture of both. What all these books deal with are the theoretical consequences (I say “theoretical” because they are fiction, after all) of high levels of #1, that is, almost total control.

For a leader, control is very appealing. I mean, we all know what people need, right? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just…well, you know, force people to be good? For their own good? I mean, wouldn’t that be a great thing if we could set things up so that everyone did what was right, everyone had what they needed, nobody was poor, nobody was rich, everything was fair, everyone was nice, treated their neighbors well, etc.? In 1984 this is achieved through fear, pain, and mental conditioning (through various methods, including torture, fear, education or lack thereof, etc.). In Brave New World it is through pleasure, distraction, and mental conditioning (primarily education and drugs). The clockwork orange in A Clockwork Orange is made into that orange via mental conditioning constituted of drugs and torture, although the torture is not the kind used in 1984, and the purpose of the drugs is quite different than that in Brave New World. All those in leadership positions in these three books are reaching for the same goal with their methods; getting people to do what you want them to do.

Getting people to do, or controlling them, is really such a nice thing because it’s safe. It’s predictable. Heck, I’ve felt the temptation to control people myself. I run a small business, and I’ll be darned if sometimes employees don’t do what I want them to do. If I had a way to condition them to do exactly what I wanted, when I wanted, in the way I wanted, then yeah, that would sound pretty good to me. I could get a lot more work done and get somewhere with my business, right?

But what if we could control an entire country of people? What if we could control the whole world? Wouldn’t that be great? We could get rid of poverty and war, hunger and disease, and especially all those mean people. There’s just two problems with all of this “control” stuff; 1) the only way to prevent humans from doing unpleasant things is to take the “human” out of them, and 2) it doesn’t work.

The books do a fair job of making these points, at least to a point. In 1984 and Brave New World the conditioning or other means of control does not work on everyone, and those who don’t conform must either be exiled or killed so as to not spoil anyone else. In A Clockwork Orange the conditioning is only done on one person, and the experiment ultimately “fails”, although it’s left to the reader to ponder whether further reform of the conditioning might not yield the desired results in a more permanent fashion without rendering the subject suicidal. Each governmental entity in the books has a certain measure of success and failure when it comes to control of its subjects. But whether or not a control system would work cannot be conclusively established by a work of fiction. It is all hypothesis, and even though the ultimate results may seem logical and clear, one cannot know for certain of their outcome. More about that later.

What all books can and do prove to an extent, not through storytelling but through logic and reason, is that if man is inherently free to choose, then man may choose to do “bad” things, and if we wish to stop man from doing bad things, we must take away his ability to make choices. However, we can only remove man’s ability to make bad choices if we also remove his ability to make good choices, and in essence, turn him into an automaton, a robot, a machine. This is clear to anyone who has the ability to think it through, and requires no proof beyond an explanation of the concept.

A man who is restricted from all activity other than thought cannot commit physical violence, but also cannot use his physical abilities to do good. But this is not the point on which the argument rests, for you might then ask “But what if we could control a man’s body so that he could only act to do good, and not when he desired to do evil?” or to take it a step further, what if we could control a man’s mind so that he could choose to think good thoughts, but as soon as his mind moved towards a bad thought, his thought process was interrupted and he forgot the evil thought so that it was though it never existed?

This would ensure proper behavior, even down to proper thoughts (if you will indulge me in including thoughts as a form of behavior), but now I have proved my point, for we have removed from man the ability to choose, because in order to make a choice, he must have options presented to him. If the only options presented to him are “good” options, then he is not choosing between good and bad, but between good and good. Not only is this no choice at all, but if any “bad” option is removed, then “good” has no meaning, since good implies comparison. That is, you cannot have something that is good unless you can say that something else is bad.

So, the fault of the governments described in the three books is that they can only create an ideal society for man by removing man from it, in which case the society serves no purpose. Only if the society becomes corrupt, wherein the needs of some are subservient to others, does the society serve a purpose, but then we have a condition which we all generally agree is not good, which is slavery–the subjugation of one group of people by force and without consent for the benefit of another. This is the result of the society created in 1984, in fact, it is its purpose, although it is a purpose generally unknown by the people living in it.

Rarely can we see the results of a hypothesis such as is put forth in these three books played out in real life, but we have seen it, many times over, in many governments around the world during the past 100 or so years, although perhaps not so fully in any country as in the former Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was founded on the idea that a perfect society could be created. A utopia, where there would be no poor. Where all would be treated fairly. It failed, and it failed miserably. The legacy of the Soviet Union is tens of millions of its citizens murdered, starvation, poverty on a grand scale, and untold human suffering the likes of which we, in the United States, would have trouble imagining possible. During the same time period, the United States produced ever-increasing standards of living, unparalleled scientific advances, and a host of other achievements we generally agree are “good”. It wasn’t that the United States had access to more or better natural resources. It wasn’t a question of culture. There was no major difference between the USSR and the USA, other than the roles assumed by its respective governments.

What then, is the purpose of a society, civilization, or nation, and what is the role of the government that manages it? It is simply this–happiness. And what is happiness? It is whatever one decides it should be. And if happiness for one man is different than what it is for another, then man must be free to choose his own form of happiness and pursue it. It then becomes the role of government to maximize the potential for its people to achieve their individual definitions of happiness. The USSR did not concern itself with the individual’s definition of happiness. Such an idea was laughable. It was all about loyalty to country, to the whole. Equality was deemed more important than individuality, and order more important than freedom. The results couldn’t be more stark.

And the experiment wasn’t confined to the USSR. Every country that has had a government with a similar philosophy has failed miserably to the extent that philosophy was implemented, and if that philosophy has been modified to include aspects of individual freedom (as is the case in China), then we have seen a commensurate benefit to the people.

Some have tried to make the case that the socialist experiments in China and the USSR only resulted in the deaths of tens of millions, not to mention other symptoms of failure, because of corrupt leaders. “If only they had good leaders,” they say, “then those countries would be much more successful than the USA.” But it is not merely corrupt leaders that have led to failures in these countries, although that is certainly a large part of it, it is the fundamental nature of authoritarian regimes to lead to civilizational failure because they ignore human nature and are therefore doomed from the start. Humans desire the freedom to define happiness for themselves, and any government that tries to force a one-size-fits-all definition of happiness upon its citizens (which can only be done by restricting choice) is destined to be rejected by those citizens. This is why socialism does not work. If any form of “socialism” or “communism” is to work, it can only work if every member of the society participates of their own free will and choice, and those who do not want to live by the rules of society must be exiled, rather than forced into submission. But this is impractical in today’s world on anything but a small scale, and certainly impossible on the large scale attempted by the USSR.

In other words, successful socialism, if there is such a thing, can never be forced upon a society or it is doomed to fail in the long run. This is the error of modern-day liberals/progressives just as it was the error of Lenin and Marx. If people are to be good, they must choose to be good, and passing laws that restrict freedoms  and control people do not lead them to be good, only to exhibit the “correct” behavior. The slave-owners of the old South were also effective in their own way at producing the “correct” behavior.

What worries me in this day and age is I think there are those who might read 1984 or Brave New World and in looking at those authoritarian governments think “Yeah, this is what we should be doing, this would be great!” I’m afraid the rest of us might suffer at their hands, in some degree of similarity to how those who didn’t two the party line in the USSR or the China of 1950 also suffered. It seems more realistic now than it did just two years ago.

The Rush-Hannity-Beck listeners were primarily already conservatives before they started listening. The effectiveness of Rush-Hannity-Beck is to mobilize and motivate conservatives, the effectiveness of Ramsey-Laura is to create conservatives where they didn’t exist before, and that’s what we really need if we’re going to create the type of society our founders envisioned.

1. Free all slaves.

2. Take the people responsible for slavery and kill 483,026 of them. We’ll show mercy on another 194,026 and merely maim them, including a lot of limbs amputated.

3. Virtually destroy the Southern states, economically and in virtually every other way, so that anyone who was a slaveholder or who indirectly benefited from slavery has virtually everything taken from them if they or their family members weren’t already killed.

4. Just to make sure anyone who isn’t in the South, but who benefited from slavery, is also punished, we’ll kill 664,928 people from the other states, mostly white people. We’ll also chop off the limbs or otherwise maim another 275,175, for good measure.

5. We’ll charge a tax to the United States of about $21 trillion dollars as further punishment.

Is that enough? Apparently not, because the above bill was already paid 150 years ago, and yet a lot of people still want more. Aside from arguing about whether it’s fair to punish someone today for a crime committed 150 years ago by someone they weren’t even related to, is there any form of reparations that would be successful, and what is “success” in this case, anyway?

“Ok,” the liberal says, “Let’s say everything up to the Civil War is taken care of, but what about since then? Mistreatment of blacks didn’t end with the Civil War, and it continues today.” I agree, but what’s the best way to solve the problems that exist? And again, what is the goal here? Is it money? Is it equal opportunity? Is it equal results? Is it respect? Is it power? Who decides what the goal is? Jesse Jackson? Al Sharpton? Obama? Bill Clinton?

In my opinion, there’s only one way to end racism, and that’s to put race behind us and embrace the dream of Martin Luther King, in that we judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. But affirmative action does judge people by the color of their skin. Any time you fill out some paperwork and it asks you what race you are and you check a box, you’re being judged by the color of your skin. Maybe it benefits you, or maybe it doesn’t, but either way, the dream of MLK won’t be realized until we do away with the race card.

Some people say to end racism we need to talk about race, but I disagree. I think talking about race can breed racism. It calls attention to the differences between us, rather than the similarities. If we want to end racism, then we’ll largely ignore race. You’re black? Who cares? He’s white? Who cares? The fastest way to end this chapter in American history is to close the book and put it in the past, and then extend fully the promise of the US Constitution, that we should all be treated equally under the law, and other than that, you’re on your own.

Most black people in the US are successful by any rational definition of the word. The media and politicians wouldn’t like us to know that, but it’s true. The majority of blacks do not live in poverty, are not criminals, and are not stupid. Many blacks have achieved high levels of success in spite of the color of their skin (Obama, Rice, Powell, Thomas, etc.) where you wouldn’t expect them to if you believed everything you hear from the Jacksons and Sharptons of the world. What blacks, and other minorities, need is dignity, and that won’t come from reparations. That won’t come from apologies, affirmative action, or even from increased funding in public schools. It’s going to come when poor blacks realize the government is never going to fix their problems, that it’s up to them to fix their problems for themselves, and that they have the ability to fix their own problems and succeed on their own terms. Too many people have been chanting “Yes we can” not realizing they were really chanting “Yes you can” as in “Yes, you can help us.” No he can’t. Only you can help yourself. If you want your kids to have a different life than you’ve had, it’s up to you and your kids. The government will not help you, they will hurt you, because they will promise to help you and they will lull you into waiting for the help that never comes. You will waste your life and pass on destructive patterns of thought to the next generation.

The only reparations that will work will come from you, not from anyone or anything else. Reparations should not be about what can be taken from someone else, but what you can get for yourself. If justice wasn’t done on the 10,000+ battlefields of the Civil War and in the suffering of the 1,000,000+ who died and their families, then what would true justice look like? What punishment could be greater? Focusing on who got what and how is unproductive. It only hurts, and never helps. Instead, we should focus on what can be done here and now. But not in terms of fair results, rather in terms of fair opportunity, and for the most part, it’s already there in that a determined, hard-working, intelligent black man or woman can do just as well as any white man or woman with the same qualities. The main problem is that there is a subset of black people who don’t know this. They think they’re victims. They think they can’t make it on their own yet. They’re looking somewhere else for a helping hand that will never come. This mentality has been bred into them by well-intentioned-yet-ignorant people as well as scheming, evil people who created affirmative action programs, welfare, home loan programs targeted towards minorities, and any other social program of the government that has targeted a certain segment of society. More damage has been done by these programs than good, and it is the last barrier to freedom for the people who are victims of it. The greatest challenge blacks face in today’s society is not the racism of those who are openly hostile, but those who claim to be helping. It will not be resolved until blacks, individually and collectively, rise up and claim their dignity, refuse handouts from the government, stop talking of reparations, stop talking of inequities, and simply go out and make things happen for themselves.

This country is not as bad as some make it out to be. You might be poor today, but you can be rich tomorrow. Ok, maybe not tomorrow, but in a few years. It’s up to you and your strength of will, your willingness to work hard, and your desire to work smart. That’s much different than most countries throughout history and most countries today, where brains, hard work, and honesty often aren’t enough without the right connections and the willingness to debase yourself by becoming corrupt.

When it comes to this topic, there’s a lot of sense in the statement “The only true revenge is living well.” Those are reparations we can all live with.

Liberal economic theory posits that when you take a dollar from an individual, that individual gets more than a dollar’s worth of value back, because the government knows how to spend that dollar in such a way as to provide such benefits. Not only that, but Liberals conclude, in their actions if not in spoken theory, that the individual who has a dollar taxed from them will get more value from that dollar than they would have gotten from any other option available to them for the use of that dollar. Here’s at least one example of how this is hogwash.

I’ve got business debt. Not imaginary debt made up for the sake of this argument, but real debt. Without bothering you with irrelevant details, I’ll tell you that this debt is no longer business debt but has technically become personal debt. That means in order to pay the debt off I have to pay myself from the business, incurring payroll taxes as I do. Let’s say I’m going to pay myself $30,000 per month this year (this is definitely an imaginary figure), in order to pay off debt. Unfortunately, because I’m paying myself that much, I’m classified as being “rich”, nevermind that I’ll only keep $4K per month of that for myself, and the rest of what I will take home will go towards paying off debt.

$30,000 per month is $360,000 per year. That means I will pay $96K in taxes. Now, imagine that Obama raises taxes. Let’s say he raises taxes on the rich such that instead of $96K, I’m paying $130K on that $360K. That’s a $34K difference. However, let’s suppose that I have the flexibility to pay off less of my debt if I want to. What is going to cost me more money, paying myself $360K so I can pay off a bunch of debt, or letting interest accrue on that debt and waiting to pay it off until tax rates go down? At some point it makes sense to not pay off the debt, or only make the minimum payments, instead of paying off the debt early.

What does this mean? It means that money I would have used to pay off that debt is frozen. Rather than going to a bank where it can be loaned out again, it’s tied up. And instead of paying more taxes to the IRS, I’m paying less. Multiply this by a few hundred thousand times, and you can see how when the government raises tax rates on the rich, sometimes they end up collecting less taxes than they did with lower rates. There’s nothing sneaky about it, and it has nothing to do with tax havens or fishy accounting. It’s perfectly legal for me to choose to pay myself less in order to defer the taxes until a future date when I believe the tax rate may be lower. Would you do any differently?